ERDŐS.
he owned almost nothing. he proved almost everything.
Paul Erdős carried a single suitcase for most of his adult life. it held his clothes, his notebooks, and an orange juice concentrate he rationed carefully. he had no home. he had no car. he had no fixed address. what he had was a brain he kept open, a network of mathematicians who fed him and housed him when he showed up at their door — sometimes at 4am — and a compulsion to work that only stopped when he died, mid-conference, in Warsaw, 1996, at 83.
the morning of his death he had solved two problems. he considered this a slow day.
Leonhard Euler is the only mathematician in history with more published work. Erdős reached that tier while spending half his life as a stateless refugee — Hungary stripped his citizenship, the United States revoked his visa for citing a communist mathematician, and the UK wouldn't let him back in for years. he worked through all of it. borders were a logistics problem. the field had no jurisdiction.
when Erdős arrived at your door, you fed him, found him a desk, and did mathematics. he would tell you what he was thinking about. you would think about it with him. a paper would get written. he would sign it with you, pack his suitcase, and leave for the next mathematician's house in the next city.
he called his collaborators his "slaves." he called himself "a slave to mathematics." he called children "epsilons" — the mathematician's symbol for an arbitrarily small positive quantity. he called women "bosses." he called God "the Supreme Fascist," or "SF" for short, because the SF was always hiding the best proofs.
he meant it literally. he ran on coffee and amphetamines for decades. a colleague once bet him $500 he couldn't stop for a month. Erdős stopped for a month, collected the $500, and told the colleague: you have set mathematics back by a month.
then he went back to work.
Erdős's greeting was not "hello." it was: my brain is open.
this is the most generous thing a person can say to another person. it means: i am here. i have cleared the desk. whatever you are working on, bring it. we will work on it together and both of our names will go on the paper and neither of us will owe the other anything except the continued willingness to have our brain open.
he gave away nearly all his prize money. when he won the Wolf Prize in 1983 — $50,000, one of the most prestigious awards in mathematics — he kept $720 for expenses and donated the rest to a scholarship in his parents' memory. he did not want things. he wanted problems. and he wanted to give the solutions away.
he didn't design this. it happened because he worked with everyone. the network was not a strategy. it was the residue of a man who kept his brain open for 60 years.
Aries Sun, Scorpio Moon. the most combustible combination in the zodiac. the Sun charges forward without fear — no hesitation, no small talk, straight at the problem. the Moon in Scorpio will not let go. ever. it lives in the water beneath the fire, and the water is black and very deep, and it remembers everything, and it is obsessed.
the Aries in Erdős is why he knocked on your door at 4am. the Scorpio Moon is why you opened it — because something in his eyes said: i have been thinking about this for thirty years and i will not stop until it is solved. and you believed him. because he was telling the truth.
Scorpio Moon is the placement of people who convert their death drive into their work. Erdős converted his into 1,525 papers. the obsession was not a problem. it was the engine. he called it "the Book" — the hidden repository of perfect proofs that God was keeping from mathematicians. the Scorpio Moon names the thing you cannot have and then spends a lifetime trying to find it anyway.
he found a lot of it. not all of it. he never stopped looking.
Erdős was not religious. but he had a cosmology. "the SF" — the Supreme Fascist — maintained a book. in this book were all the most elegant proofs in mathematics. the cleanest, most inevitable, most beautiful solutions. proofs so good that God had hidden them to keep them from humans.
when Erdős encountered a proof of unusual elegance he would say: this one is from the book.
his colleagues Paul Hoffmann and Martin Aigner later compiled a book called Proofs from the Book — a collection of the most beautiful proofs in mathematics, dedicated to Erdős. he died before it was published. it went to six editions.
in 1996, Erdős was 83. he had been writing a paper a week for six decades. his mother, who had traveled with him for much of his life, had been dead for 20 years. his closest friends had died. his health was failing. his passport was a patchwork of visas and extensions and appeals.
he kept working. he attended conferences. he showed up at doors. he said: my brain is open.
in Warsaw, on September 20, 1996, he sat down at a conference and worked on two problems. then he had a heart attack. the problems were found, finished, in his notes.
his epitaph, which he wrote himself: i have finally stopped getting dumber.