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0 pointsbtilly15y ago0 comments

How do you measure?

Erdos published more papers with more collaborators than Euler.

Euler published more pages of material and founded more areas of research than Erdos. (Yes, Euler has the benefit of having had people think about his stuff longer, and attribute more to inspiration from him. But Erdos won't ever come close to catching up.)

I think that Arthur Cayley is in third place on both measures.

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joejohnson15y ago· 1 in thread

As long as we are trying to determine causes of people's success, we should consider their location in time.

Imagine if Erdos had been around before Euler? Who's to say that he wouldn't have discovered some or more of what Euler discovered. The earlier discoveries were the easier one, the low-hanging fruit.

If I went back in time it would be easier for me to make some ground breaking discovery, like pythagoras theorem. But today, I need to be smarter and more clever than centuries of mathematicians to add something new to our collective knowledge of the universe. All of the easy problems are solved :(

angus7715y ago

Of course it would be easy to "discover" the Pythagorean theorem if you went back in time---you already know it.

Now, go back in time and <em>take away all your knowledge</em> (and the knowledge that there was a theorom to be discovered in the first place) and see how easy it would be for you to discover that theorom.

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