"His language had a special vocabulary — not just "the SF" [God] and "epsilon" [child] 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," Erdős meant that the person had stopped doing mathematics. When he said someone had "left," the person had died."
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Original Language: English
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Sources
Paul Hoffman, in The Man Who Loved Only Numbers : The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth (1998), p. 8
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s
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Paul Erdős
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