Oddlet: Paul Erdős · 1 min read
Jun 2, 2026
The Man Who Set Mathematics Back a Month
He owned two half-empty suitcases, had 511 collaborators, and once won a $500 bet he immediately regretted.
Paul Erdős published roughly 1,500 mathematical papers with 511 collaborators, both records of his century. He had no house, no job, no spouse, no driver's license, no checkbook. He owned two half-empty suitcases, one for clothes and one for papers, and arrived on colleagues' doorsteps announcing, "My brain is open."
Everything was mathematics. Always.
At 4:30 in the morning, in a colleague's kitchen, he banged pots until his exhausted host stumbled down, and greeted him not with good morning but with "Let n be an integer." He crashed a friend's twin sons' bar mitzvah notebook in hand and proved theorems through the ceremony; the grandmother tried to have the rumpled stranger thrown out. Asked by US immigration in 1954 what he thought of Marx, he answered that he was not competent to judge but had no doubt the man was great, and was barred from the country for nine years. When Stan Ulam, recovering from encephalitis, feared he had lost his mind, Erdős visited him, fired problems at him, and pronounced him cured. What else was a friend for.
From 1971 onward he ran on Benzedrine and Ritalin. In 1979, Ronald Graham bet him $500 he could not stop for a month.
Erdős won the bet.
"You've shown me I'm not an addict," he told Graham. "But I didn't get any work done. You've set mathematics back a month." The next day he was back on the pills.
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- Wikipedia — Paul Erdős — Comprehensive overview: dates, parents, education, ~1,500 papers, 511 collaborators, Wolf Prize 1983/84 ($50,000), Cole Prize 1951, McCarthy-era visa denial, full vocabulary, Ron Graham $500 bet, amphetamine use, problem bounties.
- MacTutor History of Mathematics — Erdős biography — Academic biography: doctorate 1934 under Fejér, Bertrand's postulate proof at 18, Erdős–Selberg elementary proof of Prime Number Theorem 1949, Cole Prize, Wolf Prize, 1941 FBI trespassing incident, 1954 visa denial.
- New York Times obituary (Gina Kolata, Sept 24, 1996) via MacTutor — Death in Warsaw at 83 of heart attack at math meeting; 'Property is nuisance'; lived from a half-empty suitcase; Ron Graham's 'died with his boots on' quote; left ~$25,000.
- Wikiquote — Paul Erdős — Sourced direct quotations: 'My brain is open,' 'Another roof, another proof,' 'This one's from the Book,' SF/Supreme Fascist vocabulary; clarifies Rényi 'coffee into theorems' attribution.
- Quanta Magazine — Cash for Math: The Erdős Prizes Live On — Posthumous administration of the bounty system by Ron Graham; modern mathematicians (Terence Tao, Ben Green, James Maynard et al.) still claiming Erdős prizes.
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