A life that added up to something (Obituary of Paul Erdòs)

75 pointsposted 4 days ago
by joebig
(people.math.osu.edu)

17 Comments

photochemsyn

3 days ago

"The Music of the Primes" by Marcus du Sautoy (2003), has a great section on the work of of Paul Erdòs. eg

> "Erdòs, like so many great mathematicians, was lucky to have a father who could expose him to ideas that would stimulate his passion for numbers. On one occasion his father had shown Erdòs Euclid's proof that there were infinitely many prime numbers. But Erdòs was fascinated when his father twisted Euclid's argument to prove that you could find stretches of numbers of arbitrary length where there were no primes."

(for a stretch of 100 consecutive numbers with no primes, generate n = factorial(101) and then there will be no primes in range(n + 2, n + 102)).

ptspts

3 days ago

The correct spelling of the name of this mathematician is Pál Erdős. With international first name it is Paul Erdős.

eesmith

3 days ago

He spelled it Paul, so why would he be incorrect about his own name?

In Hungarian the order would be Erdős Pál - https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s_P%C3%A1l .

What's your point? We also say Carl Linnaeus instead of Carl von Linné.

anikan_vader

3 days ago

The point is that the title and article misspell (in two different ways) his second name.

sshine

3 days ago

Every time I see Erdős, I think "Oh great, there's that Hungarian umlaut."

And I pronounce his name [ˈɛrdøːʃ], because I've heard that's how you do it.

But it pains me a little.

It pains me because I like to be correct about spelling and pronunciation; I think it is respectful.

But it is also an effort, people don't hear me right and get self-conscious about their own pronunciation.

And I can't easily type Hungarian accents.

It's the kind of name I'd prefer to copy-paste, if I need to be public, and get wrong if I can get away with it.

I'd let anyone off the hook for not correctly typing or pronouncing Hungarian accents in casual conversation.

foxglacier

3 days ago

How do you apply that thinking to Chinese names, especially those of people who only lived before romanization, or before pinyin? Using pinyin is no good because you get names like "Yang" instead of "Young" as well as huge dialect differences in pronunciation. Most people won't even be able to recognize the same characters written in two different places. I'd say use the language you're communicating in because communication is the purpose of writing, instead of inserting foreign symbols that nobody has any idea how to pronounce to make a political statement.

Having said that, I always copy-paste names of customers I'm talking to directly when I can't type them.

sshine

3 days ago

Incidentally, I try my hardest to pronounce Chinese names correctly, as I study Chinese.

You would write “Yang” and not “Young” (assuming that’s their name and they didn’t change it to “Young” after migrating), and you would leave out the pinyin vowel markers.

Since many Chinese carry a western name for the convenience of having something westerners can pronounce, that can be a safe fallback.

foxglacier

a day ago

What I mean is there's often no way to write Chinese names for people who don't know the language while also being what their owners would used. Yang ends up being pronounced like "bang" instead of "bung" and the between spoken dialects break pinyin even further. Characters are the faithful way but completely unreadable and untypeable to most people. I'd say just use the best way to communicate instead of using confusing symbols out of respect for strangers at the expense of respect for the person you're talking to.

When I see names with strange accents like ő, I just ignore them. Better that than guessing wrong. Of course if it's a real person you have a relationship with, you'd go to a bit of effort to figure it out.

fn-mote

3 days ago

Needs a year. He died in 1996.

thadk

3 days ago

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (1998) is a favorite read of mine 25 years later.

jll29

3 days ago

Reading this obituary, I wonder whether the "Only" in the book title is at all merited if he was so social, collaborative and helpful? - It sounds like he was full of acts of love of others.

ajb

3 days ago

Indeed, having read the book, his love for others does come through. Mainly for mathematicians, but then, those were the people he encountered most anyway.

He did however completely sacrifice all other pursuits for mathematics. He didn't marry and only had a girlfriend once for a short period. He didn't even have a conventional academic career, only he was so good at mathematics that other mathematicians arranged for him. He didn't bother to learn even many conventional skills: there are several stories of him making a mess because he didn't know stuff like, what dogs eat or how to open a fruit juice carton[1]

So I'd say the title is poorly chosen but there is some vague sense in which it could be considered valid.

[1] Staying at the house of a colleague, he got up early and made cereal, and thinking that the dogs needed food as well, he dropped handfuls of cereal on the floor for them, which they didn't eat. At another house, not understanding how to open a juice carton, after some thought he decided to stab it with a knife, and left juice everywhere.

TheGrassyKnoll

3 days ago

N Is a Number: A Portrait of Paul Erdös (1993)

  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0125425/

rikeanimer

3 days ago

It's wildly depressing to me that in neither the linked article or the HN comments was a mention of the 'Erdos Number'. . .

thraway123

3 days ago

Yeah, I always get depressed[1] when us Hacker News[2] Readers fail to mention little tidbits[3] of facts that connect things together like Erdos Number[4]. It's indeed solely for these little random facts that I come here at all. My knowledge of them, and my need to cite[5] them whenever they are even marginally related to the article I at most skimmed allow me to feel like I'm part of a special group indeed.

If someone does not mention these facts that I myself know, and many readers of this site know, then I feel completely at a loss. What am I to do? Am I to critically think of the article at hand. See the man depicted as something other then the distillation of these tidbits of Wikipedia article links scattered in my memory? Or do I think: no, this is an existential issue. Anyone who does not know, does not mention, does not prostrate themselves before an uhh... numbering system... are the lost ones. Not I!

This same pedantic drive, which drives the entirety of my life, also compels me to correct you: it's actually called an Erdős number.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depression_(mood)

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/

[3] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tidbit

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s_number

[5] This is a citation.