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Paul Erdős: The Man Who Loved Only Numbers

Jun 26, 2025

Great! I’ll begin researching Paul Erdős’s life with a focus on his obsession with mathematics, eccentric personality, nomadic lifestyle, deep collaborations, and his lasting legacy. I’ll draw from the documentary The Man Who Loved Only Numbers as well as other credible biographical sources, collecting quotes and anecdotes to craft a rich, motivational narrative.

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Paul Erdős: The Man Who Loved Only Numbers

Paul Erdős at a 1986 mathematics conference in Japan, working alongside fellow mathematicians.

Introduction

Late one evening, a traveling mathematician arrived unannounced on a colleague’s doorstep and declared, “my brain is open”. It was Paul Erdős, the legendary itinerant mathematician, signaling his readiness to work through the night on whatever unsolved problem awaited. For Erdős, mathematics was not just a profession but an all-consuming passion – the central purpose of his life. In a career spanning over six decades, he published around 1,500 papers with more than 500 collaborators, an unprecedented output achieved by dedicating virtually every waking hour to math. One biographer aptly titled Erdős’s story The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, a nod to his singular devotion to mathematical discovery. Erdős cared for little outside of numbers, and his obsessive love for mathematics inspired awe, amusement, and admiration in equal measure.

Early Life

Paul Erdős was born on March 26, 1913, in Budapest, Hungary, to parents who were both high school mathematics teachers. Surrounded by numbers from infancy, he developed a fascination with mathematics remarkably early. Family tragedy also shaped his childhood: two older sisters died of scarlet fever just before Paul was born, and his mother – terrified of losing her only son – refused to send him to school until he was ten. As a result, young Paul was tutored at home and occupied himself with the math books lying around the house. By the age of four or five, he was astonishing adults with his precocity – given a person’s birthdate or age, the child could calculate exactly how many seconds they had lived. This freakish talent was a mere hint of what was to come. Erdős taught himself to read using math texts and was solving advanced problems as a teenager. At 16, his father (recently returned from years as a prisoner of war in Siberia) introduced him to deep mathematical concepts like set theory and infinite series, further igniting Paul’s passion. Erdős entered the University of Budapest at 17 and earned his PhD by the age of 21, having already produced an elegant proof of a famous theorem (Bertrand’s postulate) as a 20-year-old student. These early accomplishments cemented his reputation as a wunderkind and set the stage for a lifetime of single-minded mathematical pursuit.

Dedication and Obsession

Erdős’s dedication to mathematics was absolute, often to the exclusion of basic worldly needs. He reportedly needed only about four to five hours of sleep per night, spending the rest of his time absorbed in mathematical thought. “A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems,” quipped one of his colleagues, and indeed Erdős consumed copious amounts of caffeine to fuel his problem-solving marathons. In his later years, he even resorted to mild amphetamines to maintain his prolific output. When friends grew concerned about his drug habit, Erdős agreed to a challenge: one month without stimulants. He won the $500 bet, but found the break agonizing, lamenting that the hiatus had cost him precious creativity. “You've showed me I'm not an addict. But I didn't get any work done… I'd have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You've set mathematics back a month,” he complained. Having made his point, Erdős promptly resumed his old routine of pills and intense productivity – a clear sign that, for him, being ordinary was a far worse fate than any side effects.

Nothing could keep Erdős away from mathematics for long. In 1988, he suffered a mild heart attack while in Budapest. Even in the hospital, Erdős couldn’t stop doing math. Crowded into his room were students and colleagues eager to talk about conjectures. Lying in bed, Erdős held court in three languages at once, discussing different problems with different groups around him. When the doctors entered to insist he rest, Erdős shooed them away, saying: “Go away, can’t you see that I am busy? Come back in a few hours.”. The astonished doctors obliged. This extraordinary scene – the 75-year-old Erdős, hospitalized but utterly unwilling to pause his mathematical conversations – perfectly encapsulates his relentless work ethic. He often said the only thing that ever really bothered him was having to stop doing math, even temporarily. Indeed, Erdős kept up his prolific output to the very end of his life, doing mathematics on the day he died.

Unique Personality

Time magazine once dubbed Erdős “the Oddball’s Oddball,” and he delighted in defying social conventions. He never married, owned little more than a few clothes, and had no permanent home for most of his adult life. Erdős literally lived out of a suitcase, drifting like a nomad from one university or colleague’s guestroom to the next. All his worldly possessions could fit into a single suitcase (often accompanied by a plastic bag), and he saw material comforts as unnecessary distractions. He relied on the hospitality of colleagues wherever he went – expecting, as a matter of course, that his hosts would provide meals, lodging, and even do his laundry while he stayed and did mathematics. In return, he offered his hosts the one thing he valued: collaboration on interesting math problems. Erdős was extremely generous with any financial rewards he received. He donated most of his award money to help students or fellow researchers in need and to endow small prizes for solving tough problems. For example, when he won the prestigious Wolf Prize in 1983 (with a cash award of $50,000), Erdős kept only $700 for himself and gave away the remaining $49,300 to charity and colleagues. Such was his disdain for personal wealth – he often repeated the motto “Property is a nuisance” – and such was his commitment to nurturing the mathematical community.

Erdős’s quirky sense of humor shone through in an idiosyncratic private vocabulary. He referred to children as “epsilons” (ε), a playful reference to an infinitesimal quantity in calculus. Married people were described as “slaves” captured by “bosses,” and divorced men were “liberated”. To stop doing mathematics was to “die,” in Erdős’s parlance, whereas actual death was merely “leaving” – after all, in his view, the tragedy was not losing one’s life but losing the ability to do math. Alcohol was “poison” and music (except classical) was simply “noise”. Perhaps most famously, Erdős spoke of a whimsical deity he named the “SF,” short for Supreme Fascist. This imaginary SF was Erdős’s tongue-in-cheek personification of misfortune. If Erdős misplaced his glasses or a particular proof eluded him, he would blame the “Supreme Fascist” for hiding things or holding back answers just to torment him. He also liked to talk about “The Book,” an eternal ledger in which God (the SF) had written down the most elegant proofs for every problem. “You don’t have to believe in God,” Erdős told listeners, “but you should believe in The Book”. These colorful anecdotes and aphorisms made Erdős a beloved character in the mathematics world – a genius with the childlike spirit of a prankster philosopher.

Collaboration & Community

More than anything, Paul Erdős viewed mathematics as a social endeavor, a grand conversation among problem-solvers across the globe. He had no interest in working alone in an ivory tower. Instead, Erdős traveled ceaselessly, collaborating with over 500 mathematicians during his lifetime – a record in breadth that has never been equaled. His name appeared on about 1,500 papers, but he often let his co-authors do the writing and polishing; what he cared about was the creative spark of solving a problem together. Erdős was, in a sense, the hub of an enormous mathematical network. He would show up on a mathematician’s doorstep or drop into a campus office and announce his famous greeting, “My brain is open,” as an invitation to begin collaborating. If he learned of an unsolved problem that piqued his interest, he might say “Let us tackle it together. I’ll be in your city next week – my mind is open”. And so it would begin – an impromptu joint attack on a mathematical puzzle, often lasting several days and producing one or two new papers before Erdős moved on. In many cases, upon departing he would ask his host to recommend the next destination: Who else has an interesting problem for me? In this way he hopscotched around the world, creating a vast web of collaborations.

Erdős’s prolific joint work inspired an unusual tribute in the math community: the concept of the Erdős number. An mathematician’s Erdős number is the “collaborative distance” from Erdős measured by co-authorship – Erdős himself is 0, his direct co-authors are 1, those who co-wrote with an Erdős co-author are 2, and so on. Having a low Erdős number became a point of pride among scientists, a playful indicator of one’s closeness to the center of the cooperative math universe he created. (Even greats like Albert Einstein have Erdős number 2 through chains of collaboration.) More importantly, Erdős’s example showed how fruitful cross-pollination of ideas could be. He broke the stereotype of the solitary genius, proving instead that sharing problems and teaming up with others could yield extraordinary results. Colleagues fondly recall that when Erdős arrived, it was like a wind blowing fresh mathematical ideas through the department. He would energize researchers half his age, pose new conjectures, and leave behind a trail of solved problems (and new unsolved ones) wherever he went. The immense collaborative spirit he fostered continues to influence how mathematicians work together today, whether in person or across continents.

Legacy & Inspiration

Paul Erdős’s legacy is as towering as it is unique. He tackled and solved problems in number theory, combinatorics, graph theory, probability, and more, often opening up new fields of inquiry with his questions. Many results and conjectures bear his name – from the Erdős–Rényi model in graph theory to Erdős’s conjectures that still tantalize researchers. He also left behind hundreds of unsolved problems (complete with cash prizes attached) that continue to inspire new generations of mathematicians. Fittingly, Erdős was working on a mathematics problem at a conference in Warsaw when he died of a heart attack on September 20, 1996. He was 83 years old, and, as he had once half-jokingly wished, he “left the remainder to the next generation” and collapsed while still in the act of doing mathematics. (Years earlier, he had described his ideal exit: finishing a proof during a lecture, responding to a final question with “I’ll leave that to the next generation,” and then keeling over.) Erdős nearly got his wish – he left this world exactly as he lived: actively engaged in mathematics until his last breath.

In death, as in life, Erdős kept his sense of humor. He had suggested that his epitaph should read, “I’ve finally stopped getting dumber.” – a wry reference to his belief that as long as one lives, one should continue learning and doing math, staving off the inevitable decline of old age. By “finally not getting any dumber,” Erdős meant he would no longer lose knowledge to time; it was his way of saying that only death could halt his quest for mathematical truth. As one close friend eloquently observed, Erdős “embodied [the] belief in mathematical truth,” devoting “his enormous talents and energies… entirely to the Temple of Mathematics” and harboring no doubts about “the importance, the absoluteness, of his quest.” Indeed, Paul Erdős’s life was a singular testament to the power of pursuing one’s passion with uncompromising focus. He showed that mathematics – often seen as a cold, abstract field – could be a joyous communal adventure and a lifelong calling. Erdős inspired thousands of collaborators, students, and admirers with his quirky personality and tireless enthusiasm. To this day, awards, documentaries, and even a small asteroid have been named after him, honoring his contributions to human knowledge. But perhaps his greatest legacy is the example he set. The man who loved only numbers taught the world how limitless the human spirit can be when it finds a purpose worth living for – and he reminded us that in the pursuit of truth, community and curiosity matter as much as genius. His story continues to motivate young mathematicians to keep their “brain open,” collaborate freely, and love the journey of discovery as ardently as he did.

Sources:

mathematicians biography