I watched this, and it's really interesting. From what I remember (and leaving out his astonishing achievements, with which I assume everyone is familiar): Erdos would have no stable residence, instead he would travel the world with all his possessions packed inside a single suitcase. He would 'crash' at the homes of various mathematicians, often unexpectedly. While visiting, he would start banging a spoon to a pan in the middle of the night, to wake up his host mathematicians and insist that they start working on a Math problem. He was very attached to this mother, and her death left him somewhat baffled. He was celibate, and in one interview he says "he likes women, but dislikes what they stand for".
There is also a very nice documentary on Erdos on YouTube:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iflQseSSfA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iflQseSSfA</a>
vega.org.uk has some nice videos thanks for the link.<p>I read Hoffman's book some time ago and found it interesting but a tad repetitious. A Google for the Atlantic Monthly article reveals a much tighter piece of writing. The video gives me a <i>voice</i> to put to the writing.<p>Video at 12:58 or so<p><i>"This is a man who had no home... all his possessions fit into one small suitcase and some plastic bag that he had from some shopping store in Budapest"</i><p>There is a core of sadness there. 2nd world war was rough on a whole generation of Europeans, and the writer George Perec exhibited similar frenetic activity and the use of arcane games to fend things off? Erdos's chosen game field was more useful of course.
Excellent talk. When describing the map coloring problem I think he mean to say the <i>minimum</i> number of colors, required to color the countries such that no two countries that border each other have the same color.