Ich habe einen ähnlichen Eintrag schon mal verbreitet, aber da Erdős ein derart aussergewöhnlicher Mathematiker war, hier nochmals eine Kostprobe, nachzulesen im Buch Man Who Loved Only Numbers von Paul Hoffman:
Paul Erdős had managed to think about more problems than any other mathematician in history. He wrote or co-authored 1,475 academic papers, many of them monumental, and all of them substantial. Mathematicians now compute their “Erdős number,” a six-degrees-of-separation number that describes how many people it would take to connect you to an Erdős paper. It wasn’t just the quantity of work that was impressive but the quality: “There is an old saying,” said Erdős. “Non numerantur, sed ponclerantur (They are not counted but weighed).
Erdős structured his life to maximize the amount of time he had for mathematics. He had no wife or children, no job, no hobbies, not even a home, to tie him down. He lived out of a shabby suitcase and a drab orange plastic bag from Centrum Aruhaz (“Central Warehouse”), a large department store in Budapest. In a never-ending search for good mathematical problems and fresh mathematical talent, Erdős crisscrossed four continents at a frenzied pace, moving from one university or research center to the next. His modus operandi was to show up on the doorstep of a fellow mathematician, declare, “My brain is open,” work with his host for a day or two, until he was bored or his host was run down, and then move on to another home.
Erdős’s motto was “Another roof, another proof.” He did mathematics in more than twenty-five different countries, completing important proofs in remote places and sometimes publishing them in equally obscure journals.