Clippings

Genius though he was, Gödel was not a poster boy for mathematical sanity. Obsessed with ghosts and demons and an imagined heart ailment, he checked himself in and out of sanitariums many times in his adult life for treatment of depression and acute anxiety. He was always a finicky eater, but as he got older he ate less and less, refusing to take food from anyone but his wife Adele, fearing that other people were secretly trying to poison him. At sixty-four he weighed only eighty-six pounds. In the middle of 1977, when Adele was hospitalized for major surgery, he stopped eating altogether, and by the following January starved himself to death at the age of seventy-one. In his dying days he had serious doubts that his life’s work amounted to anything more than the discovery of another silly paradox à la Barber of Seville. He was plagued by Russell’s nightmare of future librarians trashing his work.

Graham had less success influencing Erdös’s health. “He badly needed a cataract operation,” Graham said. “I kept trying to persuade him to schedule it. But for years he refused, because he’d be laid up for a week, and he didn’t want to miss even seven days of working with mathematicians. He was afraid of being old and helpless and senile.” Like all of Erdös’s friends, Graham was concerned about his drug-taking. In 1979, Graham bet Erdös $500 that he couldn’t stop taking amphetamines for a month. Erdös accepted the challenge, and went cold turkey for thirty days. After Graham paid up — and wrote the $500 off as a business expense — Erdös said, “You’ve showed me I’m not an addict. But I didn’t get any work done. I’d get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I’d have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You’ve set mathamatics back a month.” He promptly resumed taking pills, and mathematics was the better for it.

Ernst Straus was one of the few people who had the opportunity to observe firsthand the differences in style between the master physicist and the master matematician. In a tribute to Erdös on his seventieth birthday, Straus said: “Einstein often told me that the reason he chose physics over mathematics was that mathematics is so full of beautiful and attractive questions that one might easily waste one’s powers in pursuing them without finding the central questions. In physics he had the ‘nose’ for the central questions and he felt that it was the chief duty of the scientist to pursue those questions and not let himself be seduced by any problem — no matter how difficult or attractive it might be. Erdös has consistently and successfully violated every one of Einstein’s prescriptions. He has succumbed to the seduction of every beautiful problem he has encounted — and a great number have succumbed to him. This just proves to me that in the search for truth there is room for Don Juans like Erdös and Sir Galahads like Einstein.”