The more I learn about him, the more I respect on him. Can you share me more about his stories? Also have you ever met him?
2007-01-03 14:07:57 · 5 answers · asked by spider 4 in Science & Mathematics ➔ Mathematics
I don't think Erdos had a wife. He didn't have sex with anyone. I might be wrong. More information about Erdos please.
2007-01-03 15:49:57 · update #1
I'm sorry to say that Paul Erdos has been deceased for several years now. He called himself an 'itinerant mathematician', and no longer owned a home or bothered to hold a driver's license. There were a dozen universities around the world that would rather have had him than a championship-winning sports team.
He spent all his time duing the last few years of his life travelling to different mathamatics seminars, or speaking at math awards banquets. He owned practically nothing. Math was all he was interested in. Whenever he was invited to go somewhere and lecture on the kind of extreme high level math he invented (which very few people in the world could understand) he would be given a ticket; if it was one of theose awards banquets, a tuxedo would be rented and provided for him.
(If I'm not mistaken, that was after the untimely death of his wife. He no longer felt it was necessary to maintain a home or bother to claim citizenship in any one country.)
I named one of the characters in my Champions (super hero role playing game) campaign after him, and gave him 'math powers' which enabled him to 'calculate' geometric shapes and make them appear, so he could shield people from danger and trap criminals in impenetrable spheres, cubes or tetrahedrons of pure mathematical concept.
I wish I had been able to meet him during his life.
4 JAN 07, 0232 hrs, GMT.
2007-01-03 15:28:49 · answer #1 · answered by cdf-rom 7 · 1⤊ 0⤋
The wikipedia link above has a lot of well known details about him that can be found in many articles and books written about this man.
I can say something about the kind of mathematics he was interested in. Among many things, he was particularly interested in Combinatorics and Graph Theories.
Combinatorics, in simple terms, is the art of counting. For example, a basic combinatorics problem is as follows: If there are 10 guests at a party and everyone were to shake hands with everyone, how many total handshakes would take place? The answer, either by enumeration (listing out all the possibilities), or a simple technique in combinatorics, is 45. Now what about 100 guests? Combinatorics generalize the techniques in such counting problems.
Graph theory is closely related to the above. Here we study 'graphs', which in this context refer to an abstract picture with dots (vertices) linked by lines (edges). This is a great tool to generalize a lot of real world problems.
A classic problem goes like this: What's the fewest people you need so that either 3 people are mutual acquaintances or 3 people are mutual strangers? First, 5 people is not enough to guarantee to this always happening: think of a pentagon in which each corner (vertex) represents a person and a line (edge) represents acquaintances. In this case, we have neither 3 mutual acquaintances nor 3 mutual strangers. The answer to the above question turns out to be 6 (can be shown using graph theory techniques). Now what about a similar question, but I want either 4 mutual friends or 4 mutual strangers? The answer to this is 18., What about 5 friends or 5 strangers? Surprisely, this question is unsolved and the answer is known to lie between 43 and 49.
In fact, Paul Erdos is known to have said that if the aliens were to destroy earth unless we come up with the answer to the last question, all scientists in the world should stop what they are doing and solve the problem. On the other hand, if aliens had asked for the answer to the question with 6 friends and 6 strangers, then all the scientists should come together and figure out how to destroy the aliens.
If you want to find out more about him, I strongly recommend reading the biography 'The Man Who Loved Only Numbers' by Paul Hoffman.
2007-01-03 16:23:46 · answer #2 · answered by GeorgeMKLam 1 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Who's Paul Erdos?
2007-01-03 14:19:55 · answer #3 · answered by Cynyeh 3 · 0⤊ 1⤋
i havn't heard a great deal about Erdos but from what i know of him i respect him. perhaps try wikipedia.org/Paul_Erdos
sadly i have not met him though, that would be grand.
2007-01-03 14:37:11 · answer #4 · answered by wherevertheanswerlies 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
no, i dont know anything about him,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
2007-01-03 14:10:49 · answer #5 · answered by piña¡¡ 2 · 0⤊ 2⤋