Издательство Springer, 2002, -734 pp.
Since his death in 1996, many scientific meetings have been dedicated to the memory of Paul Erdos. All of them were focusing on a particular part of his vast work, a necessity due to his versatility and his broad scope of interest in mathematics. Andras Hajnal (in a paper written on the occasion of Erdos's 80th birthday) compared his work to a rain forest, where one can only see a part of one of the magnificent trees at any time.
Nevertheless, the organizing committee undertook the ambitious task of showing the entire forest, by organizing the conference "Paul Erdos and His Mathematics" in Budapest. Held on the premises of the Hungarian Academy of Science from July 4 to 11, 1999, the conference had some 450 participants, among them many of his friends, co-authors, and students, as well as many people who had never seen him, from all areas of mathematics. According to this goal, the topics of plenary lectures and parallel sections included number theory, combinatorics, analysis, set theory, probability, geometry and areas connecting them, like ergodic theory.
It is not our job to judge how successful we were in achieving our goals, but it was gratifying to see analysts attending combinatorial sections and vice versa, and we hope that we have contributed to changing the view, shared quite commonly by combinatorists, that Erdos worked only in combinatorics and combinatorial number theory. His analytic vein developed in his early work on polynomials and interpolation was manifest in a number of lectures.
Our aim with the publication of the conference material is the same as with the conference itself. The present volumes contain articles on his work and on areas he initiated or worked in, from comprehensive survey articles to discussions of more special areas. We hope that together with survey articles on certain areas of his work (which are not repeated here), these volumes provide a rather complete picture of his monumental oeuvre. It would have been impossible, and contrary to Erdos's spirit, to group the papers according to their subjects. We had to make a somewhat arbitrary partition into two volumes: analysis, probability and number theory in the first, discrete mathematics, set theory and geometry in the second.
Since his death in 1996, many scientific meetings have been dedicated to the memory of Paul Erdos. All of them were focusing on a particular part of his vast work, a necessity due to his versatility and his broad scope of interest in mathematics. Andras Hajnal (in a paper written on the occasion of Erdos's 80th birthday) compared his work to a rain forest, where one can only see a part of one of the magnificent trees at any time.
Nevertheless, the organizing committee undertook the ambitious task of showing the entire forest, by organizing the conference "Paul Erdos and His Mathematics" in Budapest. Held on the premises of the Hungarian Academy of Science from July 4 to 11, 1999, the conference had some 450 participants, among them many of his friends, co-authors, and students, as well as many people who had never seen him, from all areas of mathematics. According to this goal, the topics of plenary lectures and parallel sections included number theory, combinatorics, analysis, set theory, probability, geometry and areas connecting them, like ergodic theory.
It is not our job to judge how successful we were in achieving our goals, but it was gratifying to see analysts attending combinatorial sections and vice versa, and we hope that we have contributed to changing the view, shared quite commonly by combinatorists, that Erdos worked only in combinatorics and combinatorial number theory. His analytic vein developed in his early work on polynomials and interpolation was manifest in a number of lectures.
Our aim with the publication of the conference material is the same as with the conference itself. The present volumes contain articles on his work and on areas he initiated or worked in, from comprehensive survey articles to discussions of more special areas. We hope that together with survey articles on certain areas of his work (which are not repeated here), these volumes provide a rather complete picture of his monumental oeuvre. It would have been impossible, and contrary to Erdos's spirit, to group the papers according to their subjects. We had to make a somewhat arbitrary partition into two volumes: analysis, probability and number theory in the first, discrete mathematics, set theory and geometry in the second.