It's hard to say more about Erdős than I've already said in this blog so let's recap some of those highlights.
- What is your Erdős number?
- The Erdős-de Bruijn Theorem
- The Erdős distance problem solved
- Erdős-Szekeres monotone sequence theorem
- Erdős-Rado sunflower theorem
- Erdős-Turan conjecture
- Erdős and the "stupid question"
- Solving math problems for money
- Sum-Product Theorems
- Sauer's Lemma (which may or may not have been first conjectured by Erdős)
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.
Erdos's most important contribution to Computer Science might be the Prob method (first use of it was Erdos and
ReplyDeleteRenyi. 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!
Bill, your assertion is contradicted by wiki's Probabilistic Method page:
ReplyDelete>...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)...
Nice item in the NYT on Erdos today.
ReplyDeletesee also erdos 100, tribute to a brilliant contrarian with lots of links
ReplyDelete