Did He Just Pop Up?

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

His mother had briefly been promoted to head mistress by the Communist government. As a consequence of that, she lost her job as a teacher when they came into power. She still managed to make a living tutoring him. He said he taught himself to count at the age of three by trying to count down the days until he could see his mother for the day times again. Anti-Semitic laws were passed which restricted the number of Jewish students at universities to 6%. It was clear from a very early age that it was going to be hard for him to have an academic career in Hungary.

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.