The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, Hoffman

Erdős first did mathematics at the age of three, but for the last twenty-five years of his life, since the death of his monther, he put in nineteen-hour days, keeping himself forified with 10 to 20 milligrams of Bezedrine or Ritalin, strong espresso, and caffeine tablets. “A mathematician,” Erdős was fond of saying, “is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.”

Erdős’s ability to thik about disparate things simultaneously was legendary. Michael Golomb, who wrote a joint paper with Erdoős in 1955, recalled a time in the 1940s when he came across Erdős playing chess with a local master named Nat Fine, “whom Erdoős could beat only rarely, usually by psychological warefare… I saw Nat with his head between his hands, deep in thought considering the next move, while Erdős seemed to be engrossed in studying a volumnnous sencyclopedia of medicine… I asked him, ‘What are you doing Paul? Aren’t you playing against Nat?’ His answer was, ‘Don’t interrupt me… I am proving a theorem.’”