Paul Erdős:
 
From puzzles to the birth of sciences

Prof. László Lóvasz

Professor in the Department of Computer Science of the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary 

Paul Erdős was famous for raising problems that were very simple to state, so that often even a high school student could think about them and sometimes solve them. In retrospect, these problems represented the first steps into whole new, unexplored areas of mathematics, which since have blossomed into some of the most active branches: extremal graph theory, random graphs, combinatorial number theory, and many others. The goal of this talk is (besides some personal reminiscences) to show how some of these "little" problems build up to a full theory.