ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, September 24, 1996 TAG: 9609240080
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: NEWS OBIT
Paul Erdos, 83, one of the world's greatest and most eccentric mathematicians, died Friday at a hospital in Warsaw after a heart attack. He was stricken while attending a conference.
Erdos, a native of Budapest, lived a celibate, monkish, nomadic life devoted to mathematics. He had no home, lived out of a single suitcase and since the 1940s had traveled the world teaching, attending conferences and visiting mathematicians - he simply stayed with friends the world over.
He was known to arrive, unannounced, at a friend's house with the simple announcement that ``my brain is open.''
While he was visiting, Erdos (pronounced AIR-dish) devoted a large part of his time to working with the hosts' mathematics problems, perhaps co-write technical articles with them.
It has been said that an above-average mathematician might publish about 20 articles and a really great one 50 in a lifetime. Erdos, who devoted 19 hours a day, every day, to mathematics, was the author of more than 1,500 works. In 1986, he published 50 papers - in a field in which it is thought that most peak early.
Erdos, who was a member of Britain's Royal Society and the national academies on three continents, was known for his work in numbers theory, the theory of sets and probability theory. Over the years, he helped develop such fields of mathematics as random graph theory and combinatorics, mathematics dealing with large numbers of objects that must be counted and classified. He was an inventor of the branch of combinatorics called Ramsey theory.
He was a recipient of the immensely prestigious World Prize, at $50,000 the highest-paying award in mathematics.
- Washington Post
LENGTH: Short : 40 linesby CNB