Paul Erdős - N is a number - The man made of maths

This guy was deeply plugged into the machinery of the universe to a level I've yet to see from anyone else. Neil De Grasse Tyson + George Carlin both seem, to me, to display evidence of being at a similar level, but not in the same way as Erdos.

Long documentary, but worth it.



Erdos had no real home as soon as he went into higher education, he did his Phd at the same time as his undergraduate finishing his course, and he had no job at any one institution for a significant amount of time. He visited nearly every prestigious university in the world, and could speak multiple languages. He simply made money from lectures, donations and bets with people on maths problems.
en.wikipedia.org...

Paul Erdős (Hungarian: Erdős Pál, pronounced [ˈɛrdøːʃ ˈpaːl]; 26 March 1913 – 20 September 1996) was a Hungarian mathematician. Erdős published more papers than any other mathematician in history, working with hundreds of collaborators. He worked on problems in combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, classical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory.
He is also known for his "legendarily eccentric" personality.

"When asked what the really important things he wants to do with his life, he often says to him it is to find new results and try to prove them. Of course he has a side comment here, which is a running joke, which he calls the SF, by that he means 'god' or whoever is watching down, and he has a perverse view of the almighty, feeling that its gods job to try to make people unhappy. So, to get even, it's part of his mission is to try and annoy what he calls the SF, the supreme fascists. The Significant Few."

Erdos was without a doubt one of the most prolific mathemeticians of the 20th century, and curiously a nearly daily user of methamphetamine, which he rarely publicly admitted for fear of proliferating the idea that drug use is acceptable. He was still going strong well into his later years, even though most great mathematicians loose their abilities around the age of 40 or so. His friends made a bet with him for $500 that he couldn't quit meth for 30 days, he won the bet, but later remarked that they had set the progress of mathematics back a month.

Very interesting documentary.

Awesome stuff, now I have something to watch for the next hour... I was getting bored lol.

As well, it lead me down the Collatz conjecture rabbit hole, ATS might not hear from me for a while because of this!
en.wikipedia.org...

Then I stumbled upon Erdős conjecture on arithmetic progressions, almost over my head... I'll see what Khan Academy may have to offer. Any good sources about this that anybody knows of?

en.wikipedia.org...

anyways... thanks for the video, I'm getting sick of reading through mandelbrot and nassim haramein's works, good stuff. S&F's for you sir!

Edit: Ah man... I've already seen this one! lol Either way, great video. His take and point system of fascism is awesome. If any of you have not seen this video, I highly suggest checking it out. It's fairly old, obvious by the film quality... but it's definitely worth checking out.

Just started watching a little while ago, and just wanted to say its pretty good. Much better than I thought. This guy truly is one interesting character.