What Did You Get Out of the Manchester Experience?

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Erdos worked with Hardy and Littlewood in Cambridge when he was there. He also started working on what became known later as the Erdos Korado theorem, but for strange reasons wasn't published until the 1960s. After a final visit back to Budapest in the summer of 1938, he set sail for the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. It was only five years old Einstein was its first professor. There were zero students, no teaching responsibilities. One could just go there and do mathematics and theoretical physics to one's hearts content.

Paul Erdős (1913 – 1996) is one of the most celebrated mathematicians of the 20th century. During his long career, he made a number of impressive advances in our understanding of maths and developed whole new fields in the subject.

He was born into a Jewish family in Hungary just before the outbreak of World War I, and his life was shaped by the rise of fascism in Europe, anti-Semitism and the Cold War. His reputation for mathematical problem solving is unrivalled and he was extraordinarily prolific. He produced more than 1,500 papers and collaborated with around 500 other academics.

He also had an unconventional lifestyle. Instead of having a long-term post at one university, he spent much of his life travelling around visiting other mathematicians, often staying for just a few days.

With

Colva Roney-Dougal Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of St Andrews

Timothy Gowers Professor of Mathematics at the College de France in Paris and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge

and

Andrew Treglown Associate Professor in Mathematics at the University of Birmingham

The image above shows a graph occurring in Ramsey Theory. It was created by Dr Katherine Staden, lecturer in the School of Mathematics at the Open University.