Tuesday, March 26, 2013

A Century of Erdős

The great Hungarian combinatorialist Paul Erdős was born one hundred years ago today. The big celebration will happen in Budapest in July.

It's hard to say more about Erdős than I've already said in this blog so let's recap some of those highlights.

Shiva also celebrates the centenary of Erdős and I second his suggestion to check out The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, Paul Hoffman's great biography about his life. 

4 comments:

  1. Erdos's most important contribution to Computer Science might be the Prob method (first use of it was Erdos and
    Renyi. Later Erdos and Spencer populatized it and later
    still Alon and Spencer).

    It is used a lot!
    One indicator of this is that when it is used
    the authors do not make a big deal of it.

    Happy Birthday Erdos!

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  2. Bill, your assertion is contradicted by wiki's Probabilistic Method page:

    >...others before [Erdos] proved theorems via the probabilistic method (for example, Szele's 1943 result that there exist tournaments containing a large number of Hamiltonian cycles)...

    ReplyDelete