
Paul Erdős: a life that added up to something (1996) - michaelhoffman
https://people.math.osu.edu/nevai.1/AT/ERDOS/erdos_washington_post.html
======
bhaumik
Here's the first chapter of a book on him:
[https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/hoffman-
man.html](https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/hoffman-man.html). Interesting
insight into his personality (generous, warm, eccentric, curious), obsession
with mathematics, reliance on amphethamines, and wide-spread collaboration
with peers (Erdös number).

> To communicate with Erdös you had to learn his language. "When we met," said
> Martin Gardner, the mathematical essayist, "his first question was `When did
> you arrive?' I looked at my watch, but Graham whispered to me that it was
> Erdös's way of asking, `When were you born?'" Erdös often asked the same
> question another way: "When did the misfortune of birth overtake you?" His
> language had a special vocabulary--not just "the SF"[1] and "epsilon"[2] but
> also "bosses" (women), "slaves" (men), "captured" (married), "liberated"
> (divorced), "recaptured" (remarried), "noise" (music), "poison" (alcohol),
> "preaching" (giving a mathematics lecture), "Sam" (the United States), and
> "Joe" (the Soviet Union). When he said someone had "died," Erdös meant that
> the person had stopped doing mathematics. When he said someone had "left,"
> the person had died.

[1] "The SF is the Supreme Fascist, the Number-One Guy Up There, God, who was
always tormenting Erdös by hiding his glasses, stealing his Hungarian
passport, or, worse yet, keeping to Himself the elegant solutions to all sorts
of intriguing mathematical problems."

[2] "Epsilon was Erdös's word for a small child; in mathematics that Greek
letter is used to represent small quantities"

~~~
surrey-fringe
I've heard this same thing and I just think he was a nerd and that was one of
his gags. I don't understand why someone would write about it like it's deeper
than that.

~~~
kevinwang
I never interpret this as anyone trying to say it is deep, but just that it
shows insight into the kind of person he was.

------
sytelus
Paul Erdos published over 1,500 papers during his lifetime. That's about one
paper every 2 weeks during his career! Average professional mathematician
publish about 2 papers a year. And... still he couldn't beat Euler in total
number of pages published in mathematics :).

Fun fact from Wikipedia:

Erdős signed his name "Paul Erdos P.G.O.M." When he became 60, he added
"L.D.", at 65 "A.D.", at 70 "L.D." and at 75 "C.D."

P.G.O.M. = "Poor Great Old Man"

L.D. = "Living Dead"

A.D. = "Archaeological Discovery"

L.D. = "Legally Dead"

C.D. = "Counts Dead"

------
japhyr
For anyone with kids, there's a great children's book about Erdös called "The
Boy Who Loved Math". I read it to my kid for the first time when he was 2 or
3, and he loved it. It got us to start talking about prime numbers in a fun
way long before I would have started talking to him about them. It also made
enjoying math perfectly normal; my kid is 5 now and has no idea some people
don't like math.

[https://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Loved-Math-
Improbable/dp/1596...](https://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Loved-Math-
Improbable/dp/1596433078/)

~~~
j2kun
My cousin's five year old daughter loved this book. Learned what prime numbers
are :)

------
orbitingpluto
I took a combinatorics class that was hellish. Over half the class dropped
out, including all of the graduate students after two weeks and almost all of
the honour students almost immediately.

I ended up looking at our library catalog to look for a book that might help
with the class. I noticed our professor had a book out that was a collection
of Erdos papers. I signed out the second copy. After that I was getting high
90s while the rest of the class was getting barely 50s. The marks had to be
scaled, it was the teacher's intention not to fail us but to see how far he
could push it.

It was brutal.

------
pmoriarty
It's interesting, but perhaps not surprising, that that obituary does not
mention how critical Erdős felt his amphetamine use was to his work. A famous
anecdote:

 _" After 1971 he [Erdős] also took amphetamines, despite the concern of his
friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could not stop taking
the drug for a month. Erdős won the bet, but complained that during his
abstinence, mathematics had been set back by a month: "Before, when I looked
at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a
blank piece of paper." After he won the bet, he promptly resumed his
amphetamine use."_

~~~
gnarbarian
As an ADD diagnosed Adderall user I can vouch for this. It's like super coffee
that lasts all day. It makes you more tenacious. But tolerance builds quickly.
Taking a break from it causes me to sleep 12 hours per day and eat twice as
much and I get NOTHING done even when trying to supplement it with crazy
amounts of coffee. Even after a week of abstinence taking my normal dose again
I get 2 weeks worth of work done in a day, then I come home and clean my whole
house and learn a new song on my bass.

~~~
whenwillitstop
That's what happens when you live your life on speed.

~~~
mickronome
Unfortunately, maybe it is ?

With apologies if I've misunderstood your intent, but what you said came
across as quite condescending, and that's being generous.

In any case, for some of us it is the only way we can live at all, and without
becoming outcasts at the fringes of society as used to be the case. To some
extent we still are, as witness by many trying to hide their problems, not
rarely because of the (apparent) intent and position you express in you
comment. Yes it's a drug for many, for me it's a necessary evil. It's a locked
and completely boarded up door becoming only locked with a rather shitty lock.

Our problems might not appear real to you, or it might be that you think
chemistry is the wrong solution, it's hard to know from your comment, but I
can assure you that while I would love to be without my chemical 'wheelchair',
it's not realistic. Being able to be a decent father, keep a job, and tons of
other things simply wasn't possible. I tried so hard I completely burned
myself to the ground, while really only trying to do the things others take
for granted. Like doing dishes.

If you call being allowed a decent life is being 'on speed', then by all means
call it that. But understand that it's no different than throwing slurs at the
quadriplegic, the blind, the deaf or the dyslexic.

In a different world I might not have needed my medication, who knows ? But as
I can't change the world completely in my lifetime, I have to change myself,
at significant risk.

~~~
gnarbarian
I couldn't agree more. This is a perfect description.

------
spdustin
If he responded so well to amphetamine, I would simply think he had ADHD, not
a drug problem. I take amphetamines every day, and I also have a hard time
working without them.

(Adderall is "mixed amphetamine salts", for those that may not know)

Folks with ADHD respond to stimulants in way that is quite different to those
with more typical attention steering skills.

~~~
whenwillitstop
No they don't. Adderall is speed it just floods your brain with dopamine.
Everyone feels more focussed. It's all propaganda pushed by the drug
companies.

With all due respect, I am baffled at how people can believe this.

~~~
spdustin
Yes, they do, because the baseline availability of dopamine and noradrenaline
(it affects both of them) as well as 5-HT is considerably lower in someone
with ADHD than without, though 5-HT doesn't have much of a role to play in
attention disorders. It also has a sympathetic serotonergic effect (edit: that
is to say, that the increase in 5-HT is similar to taking an SSRI. 5-HT _is_
serotonin.)

The fact is, there are proven anatomical changes that are strongly correlated
with attention disorders, and the efficacy of the dopamine/noradrenaline
systems in the brain is significantly impaired by someone with such a
condition. And, as someone _with_ such a condition, I can attest to my
baseline being very different from someone without an attention disorder.
Further, the effect that I experience from taking Adderall is one of calmness
and focus, while friends who have taken diverted pills say they feel "edgy"
and focused, because its effect on me is to increase a low-baseline of the
relevant neurotransmitters, and someone without a related attention disorder
would have their baseline availability increased far above the therapeutic
levels I experience. Self-reports from recreational users on web sites devoted
to nootropics or to recreational drug use seem to agree with that assessment
with considerable frequency.

Maybe that helps explain why people persist in saying that someone with ADHD
has a different experience with stimulants?

Edit: I'll also add that my level of focus _on_ stimulants still requires me
to be somewhat interested in what I'm doing, and that doesn't seem to be the
case with non-affected users, who seem to hyperfocus on whatever catches their
attention first. Almost as if taking the drug gives them an attention disorder
because they have too much dopamine and noradrenaline.

~~~
lyssa17
It effects people without ADHD the same way it effects people with it. The
only difference is that people with ADHD have a lot more to gain from taking
them then someone without it. (Keep in mind that stimulants can have negative
effects to performance such as focusing excessively on specific tasks, or as
someone else in the thread mentioned - causing you to lack discretion in
choosing what to spend your time on.) What you're saying regarding
neurotransmitters is speculation since we don't really know how levels of
neurotransmitters affect performance in concrete ways.

Edit: punctuation

------
tilt_error
Watch:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wN4yLPPvRBg](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wN4yLPPvRBg)

------
leephillips
If this interests you, his biography _My Brain is Open_ , is a great read:

[https://www.amazon.com/MY-BRAIN-OPEN-Mathematical-
Journeys/d...](https://www.amazon.com/MY-BRAIN-OPEN-Mathematical-
Journeys/dp/0684859807)

------
pcl
I'm surprised by the author -- I never would have pegged Krauthammer as a math
enthusiast. I wonder what the backstory is there.

~~~
ramblenode
I only looked at the author once I had finished reading the full article and
was indeed very surprised. We're often quick to ridicule people in the
spotlight but most of them got there on more than just luck.

------
thearn4
Anyone here with an Erdős number less than 3? I have a 4, which is probably
not going to change (I work in research engineering rather than research
mathematics these days).

~~~
jnordwick
But do you have an Erdos-Bacon number, the true test of a polymath?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93Bacon_numbe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93Bacon_number)

~~~
chubot
I admit I geeked out and calculated this a couple months ago, after I was
credited on my first academic paper (my career is in programming)

If you count video games, I have a Bacon number of 3 because I was credited on
Tiger Woods 2003-2005 with an artist named Sylvain Doreau, who is credited on
Shrek. John Lithgow was in Shrek and in Footloose with Kevin Bacon.

My former coworker Li Zhang has an Erdos number of 2 and we worked together on
this paper:
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.00133](https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.00133) (with him
doing a lot more work than me).

So putting that together is an Erdos-Bacon number of 3 + 3 = 6.

------
drvdevd
I often think of a (probably not entirely correct) quote I read in a book
about Erdös. Something like, "the purpose of life is proof and conjecture."
The progression of technology seems to me to confirm this in some ways...

------
kken
Maybe something to consider when then next "I am 28yo and a senior software
developer. Is $170k salary enough or should I ask for more?" thread pops up.

~~~
zump
Friggin 'A.

I'm 27 with 2 years experience and nowhere close to that pay in my company.
FML.

------
corndoge
Inb4 a million comments on Erdõs' amphetamine use...discussions of his life
inevitably boil down to people talking about the famous bet. Rarely his
contributions.

~~~
blackbagboys
Very few people are qualified to comment on his mathematical work, but lots of
people have done speed.

~~~
laichzeit0
This is probably one of the best examples of "bike shedding" I've seen yet.

