Paul Euler's Life And Accomplishments

Paul Erdős, one of the most famed mathematicians of the 20th century, lived quite a remarkable and unique life. Perhaps second only to Leonhard Euler as the most prolific mathematician of all time, Erdős was born in 1913 to a Jewish family and raised in Budapest, Austria-Hungary. Just days before his birth his two sisters died of scarlet fever. Unfortunately, Paul’s early hardships continued when his father was taken away to a Soviet gulag leaving him with just his mother who had to work full-time to support Paul. Both of his parents had been mathematics teachers and instilled a love of mathematics in him from an early age. When Paul was home alone, whilst his mother worked, he would read the math texts left behind by his parents and by the

He famously drank copious amounts of coffee and is often credited with the relatively famous quote “A Mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems”, which he disputes, saying it came from his colleague Alfréd Rényi. Later in life Erdős began habitually taking amphetamines, which led to his good friend and mathematician Ronald Graham betting Paul $500 that he couldn’t abstain from the drug for a while month. Paul easily won the bet, but went on to complain how the bet cost him a month of his productivity and how “mathematics had set back by a month”. Aside from his substance abuse Erdős also had a great distrust of women despite how close he was with his mother. He would refer to married men as “slaves” and divorced men as “liberated”. Unsurprisingly this led to Erdős never having married and never having a child. He also created his own terms for many other things in life such as people who stopped doing math “died”, alcohol was “poison”, music was “noise”, America was “Samland” among others. Erdős also famously offered money in return for solutions to problems that he couldn’t yet solve, many of those “Erdős Problems” are unsolved to this day and the prizes for them are still claimable including to the relatively famous “Erdős conjecture on arithmetic progressions” which states that “If the sum of the reciprocals of a sequence of integers diverges the sequence contains arithmetic progressions of arbitrary length” which has a prize of $5000 still waiting to be