Do You Mathematicians Do This for the Joy of It?

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Mathematicians do this for the joy of it, like people say? Are you because you have some N-U's? I would say both. We're very fortunate in that quite a lot of what we do does eventually turn out to have an N-U' And so for that reason, people are prepared to say to speak, subsidize our hobby. This is almost a clichéd example, but... Not a clichéd, I'm welcome. But number theory of which this is an example and factorization and prime numbers and things are absolutely essential to the method of cryptography That we use in order to be able to do financial transactions safely online. Thank you.

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.