Twenty years ago, we started playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, to see how everyone in Hollywood is connected to actor Kevin Bacon by either appearing in a movie with him, or appearing in a movie with someone who did. But it was not a new idea. The phenomenon of the Erdős number was first mentioned in print in 1969! Paul Erdős, who died in 1996, was the world's most prolific mathematician, publishing more than 1500 papers on mathematics. Collaborators whose name appears on those papers have an Erdős number of one, and anyone who produces a science paper with those people gain an Erdős number of two. Thousands of mathematicians have an Erdős number of two or lower, but a quarter million mathematicians have numbers. And you don't even have to be a mathematician to have this number. Elon Musk has an Erdős number of four, and Natalie Portman has a five.
Paul Erdős could publish so many math papers because he constantly thought about math and never did anything else. He never married or had children, had no hobbies, never learned to drive, and had no permanent residence. Erdős would move in with another mathematician to collaborate, but was a horrid houseguest with his singular drive to do math. Read about the brilliant but strange mathematician at Scientific American. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: Kmhkmh)
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Erdős did so much math because he also did prolific amounts of meth. His concerned friends challenged him over it, but he insisted that hew could quit anytime he wanted. To prove it, he went cold turkey for 2 months. He then said to his friends, "Are you satisfied? Now you have set back the field of mathematics a whole 2 months!"
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One thing you won't read at the linked article is that the picture of Erdős with two colleagues at the top was taken in 1941 when they were all arrested for acting suspiciously! I looked it up. The cops thought they were spies, but they were just weirdos. Still, the FBI kept an eye on Erdős for decades afterward.
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