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The FBI spent decades tracking mathematician Paul Erdős (2015)
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- OutOfHere 2y agoIt goes to show how the priorities of the FBI have been misguided for decades. The waste has got to be a thousand times worse now with a million fold more innocent individuals affected.
- 082349872349872 2y agoThe FBI leads US domestic counterintelligence, so during the Cold War it isn't surprising that someone from a Warsaw Pact country who seems to travel randomly around, moving within (and staying at the homes of!) a group of intelligentsia whose work is foundational for cryptography, hydrodynamics, and celestial mechanics, would have had a fair amount of resources devoted to them. > All mathematics is divided into three parts: cryptography (paid for by CIA, KGB and the like), hydrodynamics (supported by manufacturers of atomic submarines) and celestial mechanics (financed by military and other institutions dealing with missiles, such as NASA). —VIA (Pedantry: the FBI also does some drugs stuff, but Erdős would've been way too small for them to bother) Lagniappe: https://simonsingh.net/books/fermats-last-theorem/wacky-fermat-stuff/devilish-short-story/ https://simonsingh.net/books/fermats-last-theorem/wacky-ferm...
- johnea 2y agoAnd as far as I've ever read, his amphetamine use was all legally prescribed. Although, I did think the article would at least mention it...
- 082349872349872 2y agogood point, and "Six Days on the Road" (1963) suggests that on-label use was more common in those days. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ncw-CwRwRo&t=18s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ncw-CwRwRo&t=18s
- OutOfHere 2y agoExcuses, a dime a dozen.
- benmmurphy 2y agoAuthor just wrote the article so they could make an Erdos number joke at the end.