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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

In Mathematics, there is Paul Erdős* - who published >1,500 papers, with 500+ co-authors, in a ~65-year professional career. Though he is recognized as being very, very unusual. And Mathematics has the huge advantage of not needing the labs, equipment, experiments, etc. that restrict pretty much any "science" to a far slower pace.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s#Erd%C5%91s_num...

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For anyone interested in learning more about Erdos, he has a fascinating life story well told in The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdös and the Search for Mathematical Truth by Paul Hoffman.

It's available for free on Open Library: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL354306M/

Erdős was also known to habitually take stimulants like benzedrine and ritalin.

I think he was already quite prolific before that started.

IMO, it is a bit of a myth that Adderall will make an already productive person more productive.

However, stimulants do motivate compulsive behaviors and rigid thinking.

That's where it would have helped Erdos. To just do math everyday and never be much interested in other pursuits takes something extra. Even into old age he didn't have anything else on the bucket list.

A lot of people with neurodivergent brains self medicate to function in the world we are in. It is hardly surprising a math prodigy did so.

I would imagine there are many mathematicians who take ritalin, but I don't see them mentioned as being Paul Erdos.

that's another thing, some people become so famous that having a paper with them is a big mark of prestige (erdos number), and people start to try to add them to papers they only marginally looked in the general direction of at best

Quite true. Though for Erdős, the huge number of coauthors was far more a side-effect of his, um, "extreme itinerant" professional lifestyle.

Also quite many of his papers are 1-2 pages long, without much of "motivation" or "context", in the form:

- Here is a problem that was posed by ... . Here is our solution to it. Here are some follow-up questions.

(Which is actually refreshing and nice, just different from a current typical paper.)

Oh, yes. The long and pompous drivel that scientific papers seem to be padded with these days makes me wonder if they're all busy gaming "paper length" metrics, playing to an imagined audience of clueless could-be-donor billionaires, or what.

My A.I. looks at all the cs abstracts posted to arXiv every day, I skim maybe 50 of the abstracts and download maybe 15 PDFs.

I am a little shocked at how many papers are fewer than four double-spaced pages, scarcely more than a tweet if you're trying to explain something that is fundamentally new to people who aren't intimately involved in that exact corner of that exact subfield.

(If my metric for "quality" was "it might frontpage if posted to HN", the superficial characteristics of the paper would be "about 25 pages with a splashy image on the first page" but unfortunately you can't tell that from the abstract, but maybe you can get the number of pages and the content first page without downloading the whole PDF.)

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