Paul Erdős: Life and work

Abstract

Dipping into the mathematical papers of Paul Erdős is like wandering into Aladdin’s Cave. The beauty, the variety and the sheer wealth of all that one finds is quite overwhelming. There are fundamental papers on number theory, probability theory, real analysis, approximation theory, geometry, set theory and, especially, combinatorics. These great contributions to mathematics span over six decades; Erdős and his collaborators have left an indelible mark on the mathematics of the twentieth-century. The areas of probabilistic number theory, partition calculus for infinite cardinals, extremal combinatorics, and the theory of random graphs have all practically been created by Erdős, and no-one has done more to develop and promote the use of probabilistic methods throughout mathematics.