By 21, he had obtained a PhD from the university in Budapest.
In his teens, he could boast to a younger mathematical prodigy of knowing 37 different proofs of Pythagoras’ theorem. At three he could multiply three-digit numbers in his head, at four he showed an interest in prime numbers, at five he started thinking about squares and cubes of numbers and so it went on. On the day he was born, his two young sisters died of scarlet fever and his mother, fearful for him, kept him at home and allowed him free rein. His life, as told in Paul Hoffman’s breezy, informative and very readable biography, appears as one long anecdote. When he died in 1996, at the age of 83, he had worked on more problems, made more conjectures, proved more theorems, collaborated with more people, and written and co-written more mathematical papers (over 1500) than any mathematician in history. He thought numbers more interesting and comforting than anything else in this world and was able to spend most of his waking life in contact with them. Like most mathematicians, Erdös had a deep need to be ordered and structured, so requiring long immersion inside mathematical abstractions. The Hungarian mathematician, Paul Erdös, number theorist and combinatorialist extraordinary, eccentric, socially dysfunctional, obsessive, childishly egocentric, helplessly dependent on fellow number freaks to feed him, transport him, put him up and put up with him, was certainly outside the normal range, but not insanely so. Being consumed by numbers to the exclusion of all else, sounds deranged. Being affectionate with numbers, endlessly wondering about them, loving them, is, though impersonal and bloodless, no more strange perhaps than being possessed by the endless ramifications of cricket or trout fishing.
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