Following my previous post, Erdös quickly became my favorite mathematician. One, he specialized in graph theory, currently my favorite branch of math. And two, the Erdös number thing was just too cool.
I remember when I was in grade school, my dad’s classroom at the school he taught at had a computer lab in it. He named all the computers in there after famous mathematicians. I remember walking around and reading the names, wondering who they were and why there were so famous. I can remember the first three computers in the lab were named Archimedes, Euclid, and Bernoulli, in that order. I remember that he didn’t have Einstein. I always wondered why there wasn’t an Einstein, since when you are a kid, that’s the first person you think of when you think of mathematician. I understand now, though.
When I got my new MacBook a few months ago, I needed a new name for it. I never really had a naming scheme for my tech devices, and I needed one. I always thought my dad’s naming scheme was cool, but never really considered it, since I never felt attached to any given mathematician. Until now. So the decision to name my laptop was easy. I named it “Erdös”. (Cool. Now any device that directly interacts my computer has an Erdös number 1.)
Last night I decided to install Windows XP on my computer using Boot Camp. I created a partition on my hard drive, and I needed to name it. I have grown weary of using Windoze; it was just kind of getting old. So I did some research to find some mathematicians that Erdös published with. In no time, I found out about this theorem named the Erdös-Ko-Rado Theorem. It’s a hypergraph theorem that Erdös co-published with two mathematicians named Ko and Rado. Perfect. I named my Windows partition “Ko”. Then I renamed my iPhone to “Rado”. Awesome. Although, I’m sure there are few people out there who would appreciate this as much as I do.
