Saturday, September 30, 2006

N is a Number

Yesterday, ICE-TCS hosted its first movie event with the projection of the documentary film N is a Number: A Portrait of Paul Erdös by George Csicsery. I bought the DVD of this award winning documentary using my Springer author discount, and, rather than watching it at home, I decided to share it with my colleagues at Reykjavík University. I also hoped that some of our students would show up to watch the documentary. (Every opportunity is good to entice students to study TCS! Unfortunately, however, no student took the bait and joined us :-()

The documentary is good and I recommend it, even though it does not hold many surprises for people who have read the popular books on Paul Erdös. However, watching Paul Erdös strut his skills on the dias before diving into the mathematics was an enjoyable experience for somebody like me who never had the chance of seeing him "live".

I wonder whether he is still managing to keep the SF's score low wherever he may be now.

Addendum: The Erdös numbers of the members of ICE-TCS are here.

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