Hello Uncle Erdős!

Not very long ago I wrote rather enthusiastically about Paul Erdős. While Erdős  has inspired me since my high-school days, I never really thought I could have an Erdős Number of 2 or 3. Hence it was a pleasant surprise when it was pointed to me that the acceptance for a recent paper for publication would get me an Erdős number of 2! This paper has now been accepted. And though it will take a while to appear on the AMS collaborative distance page given the time it takes to get published, it is something that got me pretty excited last month!  This paper on Graph Clustering was written with Dr Gábor Sárközy. He wrote this paper with Erdős . Dr. Sarkozy is also the son of András Sárközy, it is noteworthy that Prof. András Sárközy wrote 62 papers with Erdős, the maximum by anyone.

My Erdős number is unlikely to drop further, unless this happens (via XKCD):

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Friction Not Passion

I no longer make such posts on this blog. I keep them on another undisclosed location. ;-)

But I had been rummaging through some marked sections from Hermann Hesse‘s The Glassbead Game from my previous reading of it and I came across a paragraph that I somehow totally “missed” last time. Something I consider highly worthy of sharing.

“What you call passion is not a spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world. Where passion dominates, that does not signify the presence of greater desire and ambition, but rather the misdirection of these qualities toward an isolated and false goal, with a consequent tension and sultriness in the atmosphere. Those who direct the maximum force of their desires toward the center, toward true being, toward perfection, seem quieter than the passionate souls because the flame of their fervor cannot always be seen. In argument, for example, they will not shout or wave their arms. But, I assure you, they are nevertheless, burning with subdued fires.”
— Hermann Hesse (The Glass Bead Game, Das Glasperlenspiel, 1943)

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