The Sundarban
Mathematician Paul Erdős (left) and actor Jeff Goldblum have an uncanny resemblance
Public Domain; Matt Baron/BEI/Shutterstock
I reach to you with one thing a limited diversified for my latest maths column – a plea to Hollywood to make a comedy biopic about one of many greatest mathematicians of all time, Paul Erdős.
Why is Erdős (pronounced “air-dish”) deserving of such acclaim? With almost 1500 papers to his name, he is probably probably the most prolific mathematician that ever lived, and presumably that will ever stay. Unsurprisingly, with that many papers, he is famous for his work across many areas of maths, from probability to quantity plan to graph plan. Erdős achieved this output thru a distinctive way of working: radical, and some may even say aggressive, collaboration.
Erdős was born in Hungary in 1913 and died – at a maths convention of all places – in 1996, but for a lot of his lifestyles he had no mounted abode. With the upward push of Nazism in Europe, he left Hungary in 1938 for the US, but within the 1950s and 60s was denied entry to the US for his links to communist sympathisers. Instead, he travelled from place to place with a suitcase, turning up at a mathematician’s door and declaring “My brain is initiate”. The unspoken deal Erdős offered was that his host would house, feed and generally care for him for a few days, and in return they’d obtain the chance to collaborate on some world-class mathematics.
Noteworthy of the lore around Erdős was laid down in The Man Who Loved Handiest Numbers, a biography of Erdős by Paul Hoffman that was revealed rapidly after the mathematician’s death. I first read it as a teenager and fully adored it, but I feel that its potential to reach a considerable wider audience has been criminally underappreciated, which is why this column marks the start of my official campaign to have it made into a film – starring none other than Jeff Goldblum.
Why Goldblum? Superficially, he and Erdős share a remarkable resemblance, and Goldblum clearly already has one iconic mathematician goal beneath his belt within the variety of Ian Malcom from the Jurassic Park franchise. But I contemplate it goes deeper than that – Goldblum’s brand of ordinary eccentricity is a ultimate match for the way Erdős lived his lifestyles.
Take his approach to religion. Erdős was a self-declared atheist, and yet regularly referred to God, who he named the “Supreme Fascist”, or “SF”. He would say that the SF owned a e book, or rather “the E-book”, which contained all potential mathematical theorems, proved in probably the most elegant way. His lifestyles’s mission was to recreate the proofs from this mighty tome, stealing them out from beneath the SF.
Erdős also excelled at pithy turns of phrase. He referred to kids as “epsilons”, for the Greek letter usually conventional in mathematics to denote a small quantity. If an acquaintance stop mathematics, he said that they had “died” – other folks that had actually died had merely “left”, in his thoughts. Another favourite was “A mathematician is a tool for turning coffee into theorems,” although he nicked that one from his fellow Hungarian mathematician Alfréd Rényi. I can already imagine this dialogue tumbling out of Goldblum’s mouth.
Another enjoyable part of the Erdős sage already has a Hollywood connection. Because he had so many collaborators, mathematicians prefer to display off their “Erdős quantity” – the alternative of hops it takes to gain back to him if you happen to trace networks of paper authorship. In other phrases, other folks who worked straight with Erdős have an Erdős alternative of 1, whereas other folks who worked with these finish associates are a 2, and so on. My Erdős quantity is 3, if I cheat a limited bit – I haven’t written any mathematical papers, but I have written a alternative of articles whereby I’ve interviewed and quoted Terence Tao at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has an Erdős alternative of 2. That variety of counts, factual?
Anyway, this is remarkably similar to a game called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, which attempts to map the connections between actors, centring on the star of Footloose and dozens of alternative motion photos. While you’ve acted in a film with Bacon, you have a Bacon alternative of 1, and so on. Goldblum, incidentally, has a Bacon alternative of 1 because each actors starred in a biking mockumentary called Tour de Pharmacy, though I can’t say I had heard of it before starting this campaign.
A few very special other folks bridge these two worlds, retaining a coveted Erdős–Bacon quantity, which is merely the sum of your Erdős and Bacon numbers – you want to have each to qualify. Generally, these encompass mathematicians who have made cameos in films or actors that authored a paper whereas at university. The novel checklist for the lowest Erdős–Bacon quantity is 3, held since 1997 by one of Erdős’s collaborators, the mathematician Daniel Kleitman, who appeared as an extra in Suitable Will Hunting – the cast of which has many finish connections to Bacon. But if Goldblum can acquire a mathematician with an Erdős alternative of 1 to write down a paper with him, he may match that checklist. There isn’t considerable time left though, as anyone with an Erdős alternative of 1 that is serene alive is also getting on a bit – Hungarian mathematician Lajos Pósa, who worked with Erdős as a teenager, is the youngest I may acquire at the age of 78.
An appearance within the film Suitable Will Hunting presents mathematician Daniel Kleitman the lowest Erdős–Bacon quantity
Photograph 12 / Alamy Inventory Photograph
So far,
