Reply #64: I haven't read Hoffman. Any "knowledge" I have of his personal life comes from introductions [View All]

[struggle4progress]

(written by his friends) to collections of papers honoring his mathematical contributions: I suppose I own three or four such volumes

I might suspect (but of course cannot know) that his peripatetic lifestyle resulted, at least in part, as an idiosyncratic psychological reaction to the European catastrophe developing during his childhood and young adult years: he was probably old enough to remember Cohn Béla's revolution, and he must have remembered much about the Horthy Miklós era. And I might expect the dreadful continuing uncertainty and turmoil in Hungary -- including Horthy's on-again-off-again capitulations to Hitler's anti-semitic extermination policies, the Soviet takeover, the 1956 revolution -- could simply have reinforced a "there's nothing for me there" attitude

Hungary has produced some towering mathematicians (Bolyai János, for example), and Erdős Pál was certainly one of them: his early proof of "Bertrand's Postulate" takes my breath away