The Mathematical Nomad, Paul Erdős

There is an IMO outstandingly illustrated children's book about Erdős, "The Boy Who Loved Math" by Deborah Heiligman and LeUyen Pham [1]. Really witty, but also moving. I think it depicts really well why it makes sense to accept "strange people".

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Loved-Math-Improbable/dp/1596... (I suggest Looking Inside the book as well!)

I love the tomato juice story from The Man Who Loved Only Numbers:

> Graham was not the only one who had to put up with Erdös's kitchen antics. "Once I spent a few days with Paul," said Janos Path, a fellow Hungarian emigre. "When I entered the kitchen in the evening, I was met with a horrible sight. The floor was covered by pools of blood-like red liquid. The trail led to the refrigerator. I opened the door, and to my great surprise saw a carton of tomato juice on its side with a gaping hole. Paul must have felt thirsty and, after some reflection, decided to get the juice out of the carton by stabbing it with a big knife."

http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/first/h/hoffman-man.html

Medium is now limiting the number of posts one can read before signing up with a Google or Facebook account.

Is there a reasonable workaround for this that doesn't require signing in?

EDIT: I suppose private browsing works well.

There is a wonderful book called Proofs from THE BOOK, highly recommended if you like maths.

Can't say it better than Wikipedia:

> Proofs from THE BOOK is a book of mathematical proofs by Martin Aigner and Günter M. Ziegler. The book is dedicated to the mathematician Paul Erdős, who often referred to "The Book" in which God keeps the most elegant proof of each mathematical theorem. During a lecture in 1985, Erdős said, "You don't have to believe in God, but you should believe in The Book."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proofs_from_THE_BOOK

Most people know him from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s_number

Given his temperament and amphetamine habit, I have long thought of him as mathematics' wierd convoluted relation of Hunter S. Thompson.

"A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems"

> Erdős himself has Erdős number 1. People who co-authored a paper with Erdős have Erdős number 2. People who co-authored a paper with someone of Erdős number 2 have Erdős number 3 and so on.

No, the Erdős number is the "distance" to Erdős, so he himself has Erdős number 0, his collaborators have 1, etc.

In the early 90s, George Csicsery made a film about Erdős called "N is a Number" which is worth watching. You can find information on that video, along with a few lectures by Erdős and a film about his 100th birthday at zalafilms.com.

I enjoy watching Csicsery's works. For example, his film "Hard Problems" shows a respect for the IMO competition and its participants that I feel the similar BBC documentary "Beautiful Young Minds" does not.

Reached my Medium limit...

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers - and meth

Typo in the last section.

> He was attending a conference when he had a heard attack

Interesting