Paul Erdős (occasionally spelled Erdos or Erdös; Hungarian: Erdős Pál, pronounced [ˈɛrdøːʃ ˈpaːl]; 26 March 1913 – 20 September 1996) was a Hungarian mathematician. Erdős published more papers than any other mathematician in history, working with hundreds of collaborators. He worked on problems in combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, classical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory. He is also known for his "legendarily eccentric" personality.
Paul Erdős was born in Budapest, Hungary on March 26, 1913. He was the only surviving child of Anna and Lajos Erdős (formerly Engländer); his siblings died before he was born, aged 3 and 5. His parents were both Jewish mathematicians from a vibrant intellectual community. His fascination with mathematics developed early—at the age of three, he could calculate how many seconds a person had lived.
Both of Erdős's parents were high school mathematics teachers, and Erdős received much of his early education from them. Erdős always remembered his parents with great affection. At 16, his father introduced him to two of his lifetime favorite subjects—infinite series and set theory. During high school, Erdős became an ardent solver of the problems proposed each month in KöMaL, the Mathematical and Physical Monthly for Secondary Schools. Erdős later published several articles in it about problems in elementary plane geometry.
"The Man" is a slang phrase that may refer to the government or to some other authority in a position of power. In addition to this derogatory connotation, it may also serve as a term of respect and praise.
The phrase "the Man is keeping me down" is commonly used to describe oppression. The phrase "stick it to the Man" encourages resistance to authority, and essentially means "fight back" or "resist", either openly or via sabotage.
The earliest recorded use[citation needed] of the term "the Man" in the American sense dates back to a letter written by a young Alexander Hamilton in September 1772, when he was 15. In a letter to his father James Hamilton, published in the Royal Dutch-American Gazette, he described the response of the Dutch governor of St. Croix to a hurricane that raked that island on August 31, 1772. "Our General has issued several very salutary and humane regulations and both in his publick and private measures, has shewn himself the Man." [dubious – discuss] In the Southern U.S. states, the phrase came to be applied to any man or any group in a position of authority, or to authority in the abstract. From about the 1950s the phrase was also an underworld code word for police, the warden of a prison or other law enforcement or penal authorities.
Noga Alon (Hebrew: נוגה אלון; born 17 February 1956) is an Israeli mathematician noted for his contributions to combinatorics and theoretical computer science, having authored hundreds of papers.
Alon is a Baumritter Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science in Tel Aviv University, Israel. He received his Ph. D. in Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1983 and had visiting positions in various research institutes including MIT, The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, IBM Almaden Research Center, Bell Laboratories, Bellcore and Microsoft Research. He serves on the editorial boards of more than a dozen international journals, since 2008 he is the editor-in-chief of Random Structures and Algorithms. He has given lectures in many conferences, including plenary addresses in the 1996 European Congress of Mathematics and in the 2002 International Congress of Mathematicians, and a lecture in the 1990 International Congress of Mathematicians. He published more than four hundred research papers, mostly in Combinatorics and in Theoretical Computer Science, and one book.