One of the most extraordinary minds of our time has “left.” “Left” is the word Paul Erdos, a prodigiously gifted and productive mathematician, used for “died.” “Died” is the word he used to signify “stopped doing math.” Erdos never died. He continued doing math, notoriously a young person’s field, right until the day he died Friday, Sept. 20. He was 83.
It wasn’t just his vocabulary that was eccentric. Erdos’ whole life was so improbable no novelist could have invented him (though he was chronicled beautifully by Paul Hoffman in the November 1987 Atlantic Monthly).
He had no home, no family, no possessions, no address. He went from math conference to math conference, from university to university, knocking on the doors of mathematicians throughout the world, declaring “My brain is open” and moving in. His colleagues, grateful for a few days collaboration with Erdos – his mathematical breadth was as impressive as his depth – took him in.
Erdos traveled with two suitcases, each half-full. One had a few clothes; the other, mathematical papers. He owned nothing else. Nothing. His friends took care of the affairs of everyday life for him – checkbook, tax returns, food. He did numbers.
He seemed sentenced to a life of solitariness from birth, on the day of which his two sisters, age 3 and 5, died of scarlet fever, leaving him an only child, doted upon and kept at home by a fretful mother. Hitler disposed of nearly all the rest of his Hungarian Jewish family. And Erdos never married. His Washington Post obituary ends with this abrupt and rather painful line: “He leaves no immediate survivors.”