Paul Erdős

Paul Erdős (Hungarian: Erdős Pál; 26 March 1913 – 20 September 1996) was a Hungarian mathematician of Jewish descent renowned for his foundational contributions to discrete mathematics. He authored or co-authored over 1,500 research papers, establishing records for productivity and collaboration with hundreds of mathematicians across fields including number theory, combinatorics, and graph theory. Erdős pioneered techniques such as the probabilistic method for extremal problems and co-developed elementary proofs for longstanding conjectures like Bertrand's postulate and the prime number theorem. His extensive co-authorships inspired the Erdős number, a measure of collaborative proximity in the mathematical community, with the median distance among mathematicians being five. Embodying an itinerant ethos, Erdős maintained a suitcase-based existence, traversing global academic circles to work intensively with peers, funding his endeavors through grants, prizes, and self-imposed bounties for unsolved problems while forgoing permanent ties or domesticity.

Paul Erdős was born on March 26, 1913, in Budapest, then part of Austria-Hungary, into a Jewish family. His parents, Anna (née Wilhelm) and Lajos Erdős, were both high school mathematics teachers. Lajos had changed the family name from Engländer prior to Paul's birth.

Erdős enrolled at Pázmány Péter University in Budapest in 1930 at age 17, gaining admission as a winner of the national matriculation examination despite quotas limiting Jewish students. He pursued studies in mathematics under professors including Lipót Fejér and received his doctorate from the same institution in 1934.