Here's the first chapter of a book on him: https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/hoffman-man.html. Interesting insight into his personality (generous, warm, eccentric, curious), obsession with mathematics, reliance on amphethamines, and wide-spread collaboration with peers (Erdös number).
> To communicate with Erdös you had to learn his language. "When we met," said Martin Gardner, the mathematical essayist, "his first question was `When did you arrive?' I looked at my watch, but Graham whispered to me that it was Erdös's way of asking, `When were you born?'" Erdös often asked the same question another way: "When did the misfortune of birth overtake you?" His language had a special vocabulary--not just "the SF"[1] and "epsilon"[2] but also "bosses" (women), "slaves" (men), "captured" (married), "liberated" (divorced), "recaptured" (remarried), "noise" (music), "poison" (alcohol), "preaching" (giving a mathematics lecture), "Sam" (the United States), and "Joe" (the Soviet Union). When he said someone had "died," Erdös meant that the person had stopped doing mathematics. When he said someone had "left," the person had died.
[1] "The SF is the Supreme Fascist, the Number-One Guy Up There, God, who was always tormenting Erdös by hiding his glasses, stealing his Hungarian passport, or, worse yet, keeping to Himself the elegant solutions to all sorts of intriguing mathematical problems."
[2] "Epsilon was Erdös's word for a small child; in mathematics that Greek letter is used to represent small quantities"
I've heard this same thing and I just think he was a nerd and that was one of his gags. I don't understand why someone would write about it like it's deeper than that.
> To communicate with Erdös you had to learn his language. "When we met," said Martin Gardner, the mathematical essayist, "his first question was `When did you arrive?' I looked at my watch, but Graham whispered to me that it was Erdös's way of asking, `When were you born?'" Erdös often asked the same question another way: "When did the misfortune of birth overtake you?" His language had a special vocabulary--not just "the SF"[1] and "epsilon"[2] but also "bosses" (women), "slaves" (men), "captured" (married), "liberated" (divorced), "recaptured" (remarried), "noise" (music), "poison" (alcohol), "preaching" (giving a mathematics lecture), "Sam" (the United States), and "Joe" (the Soviet Union). When he said someone had "died," Erdös meant that the person had stopped doing mathematics. When he said someone had "left," the person had died.
[1] "The SF is the Supreme Fascist, the Number-One Guy Up There, God, who was always tormenting Erdös by hiding his glasses, stealing his Hungarian passport, or, worse yet, keeping to Himself the elegant solutions to all sorts of intriguing mathematical problems."
[2] "Epsilon was Erdös's word for a small child; in mathematics that Greek letter is used to represent small quantities"