Terence Tao

Could you supply some samples of some math computations that would look good?

And I actually supplied some from my own work, some from others.

And they said, thank you very much.

And I didn't hear from them for two years.

And then this movie came out.

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.