Paul Erdős and Israel

2 6 March 1973. During the 60th birthday celebration of Paul Erdős, Israeli mathematicians were denied entry into Hungary. In protest, Erdős himself stayed away from his homeland for the next three years. Erdős had taken up residence in Israel when the paranoia of the McCarthy era had made it difficult for him, a Hungarian-born Jewish mathematician, to carry on elsewhere. He had left his hometown Budapest in 1938 at the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe and for six decades moved from one continent to another, in search of ‘another roof, another proof ’.

With 514 collaborators and 1526 papers, he was one of the most productive mathematicians ever. A collaboration with Erdős, or even with an Erdős collaborator, is seen as a benchmark of a researcher’s eliteness. Perpetually travelling, Erdős still felt a homely affinity towards Budapest, where he had childhood friends and memories. Another recluse was American mathematician Ronald Graham’s home in New Jersey. The third, more undiscussed, was Israel. It is not a singularity how the newly-created fairy tale state provided a home to fall back upon, for a young gifted Jew alone in the 20th century’s hostile world. Israel has produced, since its inception 78 years ago from scratch, 14 Nobel laureates (ranking 16th among all countries), awe-inspiring research institutes like Tel Aviv and Weizmann Institute, enviable technology, and welfare infrastructure, amidst distractive continuous turmoil over its territory.

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According to mathematician André Weil, “Both the Jews and the brahmins of southern India are communities that, for twenty centuries, have devoted themselves tirelessly to the most abstract subtleties of grammar and theology. It is hardly surprising that the younger generations, when their turns came, turned towards the sciences… the natural extension of millennial traditions. In societies in which success is increasingly linked to certain intellectual qualities, both Jews and brahmins have excited the envy of others, the result being anti-Semitism in the West…” The accumulated refinement already in Jewish cultural norms enabled excellence the moment a real zeal was felt. If Adolf Hitler had not neglected quantum physics as a “Jewish science”, the outcome of World War II could have been very different. The hybrid edifice of theoretical sciences has compiled contributions from varied lands and races.

As Eric Weiner pointed out, in every era, we see ‘the geography of genius’ concentrated somewhere. Once ancient Egypt and India, the scientific barycentre has always relocated to the more welcoming shelter: Cambridge, Manhattan, Singapore. Israel addressed its need through the constitutional Law of Return, encouraging not only the Jewish diaspora from across the world, but intelligentsia irrespective of race and religion, to come and settle, building a nation that could ignore threats from the entire Middle East single-handedly. Irrespective of political stance, one has to admire the state’s achievements, often ranked as highest globally in the number of scientists and technicians among employees (140/10,000) and highest ratio of scientific papers per capita.

While Erdős was teaching at the University of Notre Dame, USA denied him a re-entry visa. With colleagues barred behind the Iron Curtain, Erdős provided the necessary bridge between the East and the West. Unable to return to Hungary for good, Erdős took up a research position at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, before becoming a “permanent visiting professor” at Technion. Biographer Bruce Schechter has implied that Erdős had ‘reluctantly accepted Israeli citizenship’, as the last resort . However, Erdős’s involvement with Israeli society, apart from his large fraction of collaborators in Israel, show his efforts to contribute beyond mathematics to the material development of the Jewish homeland. As the Budapest of his college days was preparing for the Holocaust, Erdős’s friend circle of young mathematicians was, though unintended, exclusively Jewish.

How much Erdős was conventionally religious is debatable. He was a theist in the sense that he believed that God (or the Supreme Fascist, as Erdős used to refer to him) has a Book, whose existence really does not depend on that of the SF, which contains the best poetry, art and mathematics – the version mortals can only aspire to at best approximate. His perception of life was of a losing game against the SF, who scored if one didn’t do the right thing. The objective, in an agnostic way, was to keep the SF’s score low. His view of death was that ‘there will be plenty of time to rest in the grave.’ As such, he stuffed himself with amphetamines and caffeine while working 19 hours a day.

He used the verb ‘preaching’ to mean a mathematical lecture. Apart from his Anyuka , he achieve d a non-attachment enviable to the most accomplished of monks, with compassion worth a saint and the simple living of an ascetic. In 1984, Erdős contributed all but 720 dollars of the $50,000 from the prestigious Wolf Prize, to a scholarship in Technion established in the name of his mother. He had, in 1976, founded a math award in Israel, as in Hungary, in the memory of his parents. It shows an urge to make a permanent obituary of his Jewish parents (his father died during the Holocaust, his Anyuka accompanied him on his trips till her death in 1971) in the Holy Land.

Erdős was always ready to contribute to causes he found worthy. A year after his death, Graham received a mail from an Israeli girls’ home he had donated a hefty amount to. Cosmopolitan though Erdős was, Israel did become his second home. He stood in staunch solidarity with the cause of the Jewish nation, time and again when the rest of the world criticized its policies or even existence. Just as he had refused to go to Hungary when fellow Israeli mathematicians were denied entry! Israel is home to, like Erdős, the Jewish, the atheists, the Arabs, the Bahá’í, without any emphasis on their personal faiths, unlike the powers that oppose it. Some, like Erdős, would rather call Hungary their ancestral home. Keen to reach the zenith of civilization, empowered by an irrefutable faith in the word of God, Israel sees the future in the fulfillment of a Biblical prophecy with advancing science and values, drawing on the best of brains they have anchored.

(The writer is a Research Scholar in the Department of Mathematics, IIT, Bhilai.)