{"id":643,"date":"2003-06-29T23:37:58","date_gmt":"2003-06-29T23:37:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ubuntu.my\/wp30\/archives\/2003\/06\/29\/drugs_and_math.html"},"modified":"2003-06-29T23:37:58","modified_gmt":"2003-06-29T23:37:58","slug":"drugs_and_math","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/archives\/2003\/06\/29\/drugs_and_math.html","title":{"rendered":"drugs and math"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A friend of mine forwarded me an interesting quote from Paul Hoffman&#8217;s biography on Paul Erdos: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/tg\/detail\/-\/0786863625\/104-0563263-2587114?v=glance&#038;vi=excerpt\">&#8220;The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth&#8221;<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Like all of Erdos&#8217;s friends, Graham was concerned about his drug-taking. In 1979, Graham bet Erdos $500 that he couldn&#8217;t stop taking amphetamines for a month. Erdos accepted the challenge, and went cold turkey for thirty days. After Graham paid up&#8211;and wrote the $500 off as a business expense&#8211;Erdos said, &#8220;You&#8217;ve showed me I&#8217;m not an addict. But I didn&#8217;t get any work done. I&#8217;d get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I&#8217;d have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You&#8217;ve set mathematics back a month.&#8221; He promptly resumed taking pills, and mathematics was the better for it. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>For those who are not familiar with Erds, he produced a wide variety of theories on mathematics (number theory, combinatorics, etc.).  Of course, he&#8217;s also a pop culture reference for those interested in social networks. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oakland.edu\/~grossman\/readme.html\">Erdos numbers<\/a> are effectively the degree in which one is removed from collaborating with Erdos on papers.  [Think Kevin Bacon game for mathematicians.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A friend of mine forwarded me an interesting quote from Paul Hoffman&#8217;s biography on Paul Erdos: &#8220;The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth&#8221; Like all of Erdos&#8217;s friends, Graham was concerned about his drug-taking. In 1979, Graham bet Erdos $500 that he couldn&#8217;t stop taking [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-altered-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}