Paul Erdos is dead

On 20 September 1996, one of the best mathematicians of our time died. Paul Erdos was attending a combinatorics conference when he suffered a double heart attack and died a few hours later.

He was not exactly like most other human beings.

• He didn't have a home, though he could afford one. Instead he had a network of friends all over the world with whom he'd stay. He'd just drop in suddenly and say ``My brain is open''. Without hesitation, his surprised friends would invite him in!
• He thought money was a nuisance, and gave most of it away (if only this wasn't unusual among humans!)
• He loved simple solutions to problems. More importantly, he could find them as well. He once heard that two mathematicians had produced a 30 page proof of a theorem. After ten minutes, he produced a two line proof!

Wouldn't you like to read more about him? There were several obituaries for him, even by commercial magazines and newspapers who normally pay no attention to maths. Here are a few links:

• The Washington Post had a brilliant article by Charles Krauthammer. If you don't find it there, the same text can be found here.
• The New York Times had a cute front page article on Paul, you'll find its text here.
• Possibly the most concrete of the obituaries I found was Ivars Peterson's Mathland column in Science News Online: