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A Life that Added Up to Something: Paul Erdos (1996)
- patrickg-zill 17y agoFunny anecdote from Sun bigwig: using your Erdos number to decide who goes first in line... http://blogs.sun.com/stern/entry/seating_algorithms_and_why_whit http://blogs.sun.com/stern/entry/seating_algorithms_and_why_...
- bitdiddle 17y agoWell my Erdos number is 5. Can I get a few more HN karma points for it :)
- zandorg 17y agoA nice read. I love reading about maths, just not doing it.
- gustavo_duarte 17y agoTry reading A Journey Through Genius: http://www.amazon.com/Journey-through-Genius-Theorems-Mathematics/dp/014014739X/ http://www.amazon.com/Journey-through-Genius-Theorems-Mathem... The read part is _great_, and it gets you to do math in a way that flows pretty easily from the reading.
- jyothi 17y agoI read "The Man Who Knew Infinity" - Ramanujan's biography and it was fantastic read. http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Knew-Infinity-Ramanujan/dp/0684192594 http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Knew-Infinity-Ramanujan/dp/068... Do check out recommendations by Amazon, seems like a great set of books.
- luckystrike 17y agoYes, it is a good read. Also, it was a good insight for me in to South Indian living/culture of those days.
- bitdiddle 17y agoThis was a great book. The story about the taxi cab number 1729 was staggering to me in what it implied about how Ramanujan's mind worked. It was also profoundly sad that because the little formal exposure he had was from a book where there were no proofs he thought that one merely stated results. Many PhDs have since been awarded for proofs of some of these results.
- aneesh 17y agoPaul Erdős was quite a character. Read The Man Who Loved Only Numbers for some fun stories about him.
- Evgeny 17y agoFor his epitaph he suggested, "I've finally stopped getting dumber."
- soundsop 17y agoVégre nem butulok tovább. [Finally I am becoming stupider no more.]
- bitdiddle 17y agoHank Aaron has an Erdos number of 1
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y agoNo, he hasn't. Quoting WikiPedia: It is jokingly said that Baseball Hall of Famer Hank Aaron has an Erdős number of 1 because they both autographed the same baseball when Emory University awarded them honorary degrees on the same day. Erdős numbers have also been humorously assigned to an infant, a horse, and several actors. The fundamental principle underlying the Erdos number is collaboration. If you didn't work together, you don't get the credit. Color me humorless if you like, but I would've thought hackers would care about being accurate and precise.
- bitdiddle 17y agoyes it is jokingly said. The book cited above (The man who knew only numbers") is a great read. It has a picture of Erdos with Aaron receiving honorary degrees. I studied graph theory for a year at MSU with Edgar Palmer in 1981. At the time the proof of the four color conjecture, which was very controversial because it used a computer program (egads!!) was making the rounds. Palmer related many interesting stories about Erdos and also had us work on some of the problems for which Erdos had offered rewards.
- jyothi 17y agoApart from his Other idiosyncratic elements 'died' and 'left' of Erdős vocabulary I found the following particularly amusing: # children were referred to as "epsilons" (because in mathematics, particularly calculus, an arbitrarily small positive quantity is commonly denoted ε); # to give a mathematical lecture was "to preach" and # to give an oral exam to a student was "to torture" him/her.
- Create 17y agoThe second two are quite common in Hungarian (i.e. any lecture given from a pedestal/"cathedra").
- andeka 17y agoI love hacker news.