Paul Erdős Quotes

It is not enough to be in the right place at the right time. You should also have an open mind at the right time.

In a way, mathematics is the only infinite human activity. It is conceivable that humanity could eventually learn everything in physics or biology. But humanity certainly won't ever be able to find out everything in mathematics, because the subject is infinite. Numbers themselves are infinite. That's why mathematics is really my only interest.

Mathematics is the surest way to immortality. If you make a big discovery in mathematics, you will be remembered after everyone else will be forgotten.

When he said someone had "died", Erdős meant that the person had stopped doing mathematics. When he said someone had "left", the person had died.

Mathematicians are finite, flawed beings who spend their lives trying to understand the infinite and perfect.

Mathematicians need only peace of mind and occasionally, paper and pencil.

I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren't beautiful, nothing is.

here are three signs of senility. The first sign is that a man forgets his theorems. The second sign is that he forgets to zip up. The third sign is that he forgets to zip down.

When he said someone had 'died', Erdős meant that that the person had stopped doing mathematics. When he said someone had 'left', the person had died.

Those who have witnessed the deep truths of mathematics, Bell wrote, "have experienced something no jellyfish has ever felt".

I am not qualified to say whether or not God exists. I kind of doubt He does. Nevertheless I'm always saying that the SF( The SF is the supreme Fascist, the Number-One guy up there) has this transfinite book-transfinite being a concept in mathematics that is larger than infinite-that contains the best proofs of all mathematical theorems, proofs that are elegant and perfect.

When the interests of Erdos's colleagues drifted away from pure mathematics, he made no secret of his disapproval. "When I wasn't sure whether to stay a mathematician or go to the Technical University and become an engineer, Vazsonyi recalled, "Erdos warned me: 'I'll hide, and when you enter the Technical University, I will shoot you.' That settled the matter." When probability theorist Mark Kac had a paper published in the Journal if Applied Physics based on his work during the war at MIT's Radiation Laboratory, Erdos sent him a one sentence postcard: "I am praying for your soul." Erdos was "reminding me," Kac said, "that I might be straying from the path of true virtue, which, as a matter of fact, I was.

You've showed me I'm not an addict, but I didn't get any work done...you've set mathematics back a month.

In this moment I’m reminded of Thor tutoring me math in the second grade. Thor was a math major in college, and in fact, Thor has an Erdős number of three. This means that Thor studied with someone who studied with someone who studied with Paul Erdős. Erdős was a brilliant mathematician who was as famous for his eccentric lifestyle as his mathematical theorems. I guess this give me an Erdős number of four.

This is the remarkable paradox of mathematics," observed commentator John Tierney. "No matter how determinedly its practitioners ignore the world, they consistently produce the best tools for understanding it. The Greeks decide to study, for no good reason, a curve called an ellipse, and 2,000 years later astronomers discover that it describes the way the planets move around the sun. Again, for no good reason, in 1854 a German mathematician, Bernhard Riemann, wonders what would happen if he discards one of the hallowed postulates of Euclid's plane geometry. He builds a seemingly ridiculous assumption that it's not possible to draw two lines parallel to each other. His non-Euclidean geometry replaces Euclid's plane with a bizarre abstraction called curved space, and then, 60 years later, Einstein announces that this is the shape of the universe.

An engineer is a machine for turning coffee into designs (apologies to Paul Erdős)