Terence Tao

So I was caught unawares.

But it did actually come from me.

Right.

So Paul Erdős was this Hungarian mathematician.

He was rather extreme.

So mathematicians have a reputation for being a little idiosyncratic, but he was rather extreme even among mathematicians.

He didn't own a home.

He would travel the world constantly and crash on other mathematicians' couches basically for his whole life.

But while doing so, he would talk math with them, and they would often write papers.

He has like 2,000 or 3,000 papers.

He's one of the most prolific mathematicians in history.

And he was famous for posing problems that he would attach little cash prizes to often.

Like, here's a little problem I just came up with.

You get $25 or something if you can solve this problem.

And in fact, many of these problems did get solved and Erdős would send them a check with that amount of money.

But these checks were almost never cashed because they were more valuable framed on the wall as someone who had solved an Erdős problem.

That's all I'm saying.

There's a biography of Paul Erdos called The Man Who Loved Only Numbers.

And that is a pretty good description of it.

I met him once and basically the entire conversation was about math.