Jeff Goldblum should make a film about this legendary mathematician

I come to you with something a little different for my latest math column: a call for Hollywood to make a comedic biopic about one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, Paul Erdős.

Why does Erdős (pronounced “air-dish”) deserve such praise? With nearly 1,500 articles to his credit, he is probably the most prolific mathematician who ever lived, and perhaps ever will live. Not surprisingly, with so many papers, he is known for his work in many areas of mathematics, from probability to number theory to graph theory. Erdős achieved this result through a unique working method: radical, and some might even say aggressive, collaboration.

Erdős was born in Hungary in 1913 and died – at a mathematics conference of all places – in 1996, but for much of his life he had no fixed abode. With the rise of Nazism in Europe, he left Hungary in 1938 for the United States, but in the 1950s and 1960s he was refused entry to the United States because of his ties to communist sympathizers. Instead, he traveled from place to place with a suitcase, showing up at a mathematician’s door and declaring, “My brain is open.” The tacit agreement Erdős offered was that his host would house him, feed him, and generally take care of him for a few days, and in return they would have the chance to collaborate on world-class mathematics.

Much of the tradition around Erdős was laid down in The man who only loved numbersa biography of Erdős by Paul Hoffman published shortly after the mathematician’s death. I first read it when I was a teenager and absolutely loved it, but I feel like its potential to reach a much wider audience has been criminally underestimated, which is why this column marks the start of my official campaign to make it into a film – starring none other than Jeff Goldblum.

Why Goldblum? At first glance, he and Erdős share a remarkable resemblance, and Goldblum of course already has an iconic mathematician role under his belt in the form of Ian Malcom from Jurassic Park franchise. But I think it goes deeper than that: Goldblum’s strange eccentricity fits perfectly with the way Erdős lived his life.

Take his approach to religion. Erdős was a self-proclaimed atheist, and yet he frequently referred to God, whom he called the “supreme fascist” or “SF.” He would say that SF had a book, or rather “the Book”, which contained every possible mathematical theorem, proven in the most elegant way. His life’s mission was to recreate the proofs of this powerful work, stealing them from SF.

Erdős also excelled in concise turns of phrase. He called the children “epsilons,” after the Greek letter often used in mathematics to denote a small quantity. If an acquaintance gave up mathematics, he would say that they had “died” – those who had actually died had simply “gone,” in his mind. Another favorite was “A mathematician is an apparatus for turning coffee into theorems”, although he borrowed this phrase from fellow Hungarian mathematician Alfréd Rényi. I can already imagine this dialogue coming out of Goldblum’s mouth.

Another funny part of the Erdős story already has a connection to Hollywood. Because he had many collaborators, mathematicians like to display their “Erdős number” – the number of hops it takes to get back to him when tracing paper author networks. In other words, people who worked directly with Erdős have an Erdős number of 1, while people who worked with these close associates have a 2, and so on. My Erdős number is 3, if I’m cheating a bit – I haven’t written any papers on mathematics, but I have written a number of papers in which I interviewed and quoted Terence Tao of the University of California, Los Angeles, who has an Erdős number of 2. That kind of thing counts, right?

Either way, this sounds remarkably like a game called Six Degrees by Kevin Bacon, which attempts to map the connections between actors, focusing on the star of Free from all ties and dozens of other films. If you starred in a film with Bacon, you have a Bacon number of 1, and so on. Goldblum, incidentally, has a Bacon Number of 1 because both actors starred in a mockumentary about cycling called Pharmacy Toweralthough I can’t say I had heard of it before starting this campaign.

A few very special people bridge these two worlds, holding a coveted Erdős-Bacon number, which is simply the sum of your Erdős and Bacon numbers – you must have both to qualify. These are usually mathematicians who have appeared in films or actors who wrote a paper while in college. The current record for the lowest Erdős-Bacon number is 3, held since 1997 by one of Erdős’ collaborators, the mathematician Daniel Kleitman, who appeared as a figure in Goodwill Hunting – whose cast has many close ties to Bacon. But if Goldblum can find a mathematician with an Erdős number of 1 to write a paper with him, he could tie that record. There isn’t much time left, however, as anyone still alive with Erdős number 1 is also getting by a bit – Hungarian mathematician Lajos Pósa, who worked with Erdős when he was a teenager, is the youngest I could find at 78 years old.

So far I’ve painted a pretty amusing picture of Erdős, but it’s also worth pointing out his flaws. Although it is not described as such in The man who only loved numbersErdős was clearly sexist, referring to women and men as “bosses” and “slaves”, while to marry meant being “captured” – although it must be said that he was happy to collaborate with female mathematicians. His habit of showing up at people’s homes unannounced and uninvited didn’t quite conform to social norms, and I’m sure there must have been times when a mathematician (or his family) opened their door to the scruffy Erdős and thought “Argh, not that guy again!”.

Another obstacle to my dream of an Erdős biopic is that it relies heavily on the “distracted professor” stereotype of mathematicians, and do we really need another story that reinforces such stereotypes, potentially deterring people from appreciating mathematics? I sympathize with this argument, but I will reject it for two reasons.

The first is that all major math biopics to date have been serious affairs – think A beautiful spiritabout John Nash, or The man who knew infinitywhich tells the story of Srinivasa Ramanujan (as it happens, it was in my review of the latter that I first floated the idea of ​​Goldblum in the role of Erdős). A comedic biopic about mathematics has simply never been attempted before.

The second is that Erdős left a legacy of unresolved problems of varying degrees, some of which even come with a cash reward for their resolution. These problems surely deserve to be more widely disseminated among puzzle-minded people, and indeed there is currently a fascinating renaissance underway in which hobbyists are using AI-assisted tools to make real progress in these areas. Erdős would almost certainly approve of a film that would help further spread his gospel, encouraging people to pick up a pencil (or a chatbot) and continue his eternal fight against the supreme fascist in an attempt to decipher the Book. Jeff, if you (or your agent!) are reading this, give me a call – I’m ready and willing to help you make this happen.