Post by dividavi on Apr 13, 2018 23:50:51 GMT
Paul Erdős [also Erdős Pál, Pál Erdős, Erdos or Erdös] (26 March 1913 – 20 September 1996) was an immensely prolific and famously eccentric mathematician who, with hundreds of collaborators, worked on problems in combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, classical analysis, approximation theory, set theory and probability theory. Here are some of his very worthy quotations:
On one occasion, Erdős met a mathematician and asked him where he was from. “Vancouver,” the mathematician replied. “Oh, then you must know my good friend Elliot Mendelson”, Erdős said. The reply was “I AM your good friend Elliot Mendelson.”
On Karl Marx: I'm not competent to judge. But no doubt he was a great man.
Another roof, another proof.
Suppose aliens invade the earth and threaten to obliterate it in a year's time unless human beings can find the Ramsey number for red five and blue five. We could marshal the world's best minds and fastest computers, and within a year we could probably calculate the value. If the aliens demanded the Ramsey number for red six and blue six, however, we would have no choice but to launch a preemptive attack.
Television is something the Russians invented to destroy American education.
Did Paul Erdős believe in God? The SF created us to enjoy our suffering. … The sooner we die, the sooner we defy His plans.
Some French socialist said that private property was theft … I say that private property is a nuisance.
On one occasion, Erdős met a mathematician and asked him where he was from. “Vancouver,” the mathematician replied. “Oh, then you must know my good friend Elliot Mendelson”, Erdős said. The reply was “I AM your good friend Elliot Mendelson.”
On Karl Marx: I'm not competent to judge. But no doubt he was a great man.
Response to a question by an agent of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service in 1954 as to what he thought of Karl Marx, often cited as an indication of his detachment from political sensibilities and the situations of the McCarthy era. He was afterwards denied a return visa for re-entering the US until 1959, after attending the International Congress of Mathematicians in Amsterdam; as quoted in The Man Who Loved Only Numbers : The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth (1998) by Paul Hoffman, p. 128
His motto, as he roamed about the world, as the guest of other mathematicians, as quoted in A Tribute to Paul Erdős (1990)
As quoted in "Ramsey Theory" by Ronald L. Graham and Joel H. Spencer, in Scientific American (July 1990), p. 112-117
As quoted in Comic Sections : The Book of Mathematical Jokes, Humour, Wit, and Wisdom (1993) by Des MacHale
SF was an abbreviation for "Supreme Fascist" — the term Erdős often used to refer to God, as quoted in The Man Who Loved Only Numbers : The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth (1998) by Paul Hoffman, p. 4
Referring to a famous statement by the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon that "Property is theft!", as quoted in The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (1998) by Paul Hoffman, p. 7
