Mathematicians
Paul Erdos
PAWL AIR-dosh (Hungarian Erdos, the o carrying a double acute accent)
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Hungarian mathematician, one of the most prolific in history with more than 1,500 published papers across number theory, combinatorics, graph theory and probability, most of them written jointly with one or more of over 500 different collaborators (the playful measure of collaborative distance from him, the Erdos number, is still used among mathematicians today). He lived an itinerant life with almost no permanent home or possessions, travelling between colleagues' houses and mathematical conferences with a single suitcase, arriving to announce his mind was open, and pioneered the probabilistic method, using probability theory to prove the existence of mathematical objects that are extremely difficult to construct explicitly.
Facts
BirthplaceBudapest, Kingdom of Hungary 1 Death PlaceWarsaw, Poland, of a heart attack while attending a mathematics conference 1 Nationality / Culture Defining ContributionPioneered the probabilistic method in combinatorics; foundational results across number theory and graph theory produced through an unmatched breadth of collaboration. 1 Notable WorkOn the Evolution of Random Graphs (with Alfred Renyi, 1960) 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Frequent collaborator; co-poser of the Erdos-Straus conjecture.
Conjectures Posed
In Branch
Sources
1. MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
University of St Andrews, School of Mathematics and StatisticsIn Branch: CombinatoricsView the Source Paul Erdos (1913-1996), Biography (MacTutor History of Mathematics)
MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St AndrewsAssociated With: Combinatorics, https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Erdos/Quote, Associated With: Combinatorics, https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Erdos/
founded the field of discrete mathematics
Ernst G. Straus (Wikipedia)
WikipediaAssociated With: Ernst G. Straus, On the Erdos-Straus conjecture sectionQuote, Associated With: Ernst G. Straus, On the Erdos-Straus conjecture section
One of his best known contributions in popular mathematics is the Erdos-Straus conjecture that every number of the form 4/n has a three-term Egyptian fraction.
Erdos-Straus Conjecture (Wikipedia)
WikipediaConjectures Posed: Erdos-Straus Conjecture, History sectionQuote, Conjectures Posed: Erdos-Straus Conjecture, History section
named after Paul Erdos and Ernst G. Straus, who formulated it in 1948
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