Andy Ihnatko’s Colossal Waste of Bandwidth points at Paul Hoffman’s site about Paul Erd?s, the Hungarian number theorist, who said about himself:

A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.

Paul Hoffman wrote an excellent biography of Erd?s, “The Man Who Loved Only Numbers” – which I coincidentally reread last month. The site itself is also interesting, with lots of number-theory stuff casually strewn about, and certainly the oddest site navigation bar I’ve ever seen.

Highly recommended.

Update: Oops. Forgot to link to the Paul Erd?s Information page, which has N additional links, and to the Erd?s Number Project, which attempts to track collaboration between mathematicians. The “Erd?s Number” is an integer that measures the link of collaborations between Erd?s and some other author.

I recall that Stan Kelly-Bootle, senior computerist and columnist extraordinaire (“more columns than the @#$%ing Parthenon”), once offered to co-write a paper with me, thus assigning me an Erd?s Number of 4 (or was it 5?); but it didn’t work out. I just read Stan’s recent SODA and was shocked to hear about his heart attack; hopefully he’ll be okay…