The two protagonists in the Sound Bites section: Paul Erdős teaching 10-year-old Terence Tao in 1985. Today, many consider Tao to be the current most brilliant mathematician. He obtained his PhD at the age of 20 and became a full professor at the age of 24. He received the Fields Medal, the top prize in mathematics, in 2006. Erdős (1913-1996) is one of the most influential mathematical figures and the record holder for the largest number of mathematical papers (over 1,500) published in a lifetime. He remained a bachelor and spent his adult life as a vagabond, travelling between universities, conferences and homes of mathematicians, and relentlessly doing research in various areas of mathematics (especially discrete mathematics). His motto was “another roof, another proof”. His life was documented in the film N Is a Number: A Portrait of Paul Erdős and in the book The Man Who Loved Only Numbers.

Photo: https://plus.google.com/+TerenceTao27/posts/fiZbgKv4Yew

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