Areeba Merriam in Cantor’s Paradise:
Hungarian-born Paul Erdős (1913–1996) was a legendary mathematician of the 20th century. He is famous for having published more research papers than anyone since Euler. Both of his parents used to teach mathematics.
At 16, his father made him familiar with two of his lifetime favorite subjects; set theory and infinite series. Erdős always remembered his parents with great affection and love. At 17, he started university in Budapest then he left for the US during the pre-war years. At 20, he was successful in constructing an elegant proof of famous Bertrand’s postulate in number theory. It stated, “for every number greater than 1, there always exists at least one prime between it and it’s double”.
His work spread across many fields including discrete mathematics, graph theory, mathematical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory. He contributed mainly to the branch of combinatorics known as the Ramsey theory. Much of his research centered around cracking formerly unsolved and open problems of the field, rather than constructing new areas in mathematics.
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