{"id":196092,"date":"2024-09-12T19:25:04","date_gmt":"2024-09-13T00:25:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/09\/the-fbi-spent-decades-tracking-mathematician-paul-erdos-only-to-conclude-that-the-guy-was-just-really-into-math"},"modified":"2024-09-12T19:25:04","modified_gmt":"2024-09-13T00:25:04","slug":"the-fbi-spent-decades-tracking-mathematician-paul-erdos-only-to-conclude-that-the-guy-was-just-really-into-math","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/09\/the-fbi-spent-decades-tracking-mathematician-paul-erdos-only-to-conclude-that-the-guy-was-just-really-into-math","title":{"rendered":"The FBI spent decades tracking mathematician Paul Erd\u0151s, only to conclude that the guy was just really into math"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-fbi-spent-decades-tracking-mathematician-paul-erdos-only-to-conclude-that-the-guy-was-just-really-into-math2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Someone went through Paul Erdos\u2019 FBI files and found that all suspicious activities was really just him doing math.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>A Hungarian born in the early 20th century, Paul (Pal) Erd\u0151s, mathematician, was well-known and well-liked, the sort of eccentric scientist from the Soviet sphere that made Feds\u2019 ears perk up in mid-century America. His lifetime generated over 500 scholarly papers and a cult of collaborators. The Erd\u0151s number has become a mathy merit badge, and for those that don\u2019t hold <a href=\"https:\/\/xkcd.com\/599\/\">a coveted Erd\u0151s number of 1<\/a>, there are <a href=\"http:\/\/wwwp.oakland.edu\/enp\/compute\/\">resources<\/a> to determine just how many degrees of celebrity separation exist between the man himself and <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/List_of_people_by_Erd%C5%91s_number\">other technical paper bylines<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>But, try as they might, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.muckrock.com\/foi\/united-states-of-america-10\/paul-erdos-fbi-file-6317\/#comm-70941\">the Federal Bureau of Investigation<\/a> was never able to find much motivation behind his movements and acquaintances <a href=\"https:\/\/www.muckrock.com\/foi\/united-states-of-america-10\/paul-erdos-fbi-file-6317\/#comm-70941\">beyond the math of it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>His political criticisms applied equally to both sides of the Cold War crowd.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Someone went through Paul Erdos\u2019 FBI files and found that all suspicious activities was really just him doing math. A Hungarian born in the early 20th century, Paul (Pal) Erd\u0151s, mathematician, was well-known and well-liked, the sort of eccentric scientist from the Soviet sphere that made Feds\u2019 ears perk up in mid-century America. His lifetime [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2229],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mathematics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/709"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196092\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}