Jeff Goldblum should make a film about this legendary mathematician

I come to you with something a little different for my latest maths column – a plea to Hollywood to make a comedy biopic about one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, Paul Erdős.

Why is Erdős (pronounced “air-dish”) deserving of such acclaim? With almost 1500 papers to his name, he is probably the most prolific mathematician that ever lived, and possibly that will ever live. Unsurprisingly, with that many papers, he is known for his work across many areas of maths, from probability to number theory to graph theory. Erdős achieved this output through a unique way of working: radical, and some might even say aggressive, collaboration.

Erdős was born in Hungary in 1913 and died – at a maths conference of all places – in 1996, but for much of his life he had no fixed abode. With the rise of Nazism in Europe, he left Hungary in 1938 for the US, but in the 1950s and 60s was denied entry to the US for his links to communist sympathisers. Instead, he travelled from place to place with a suitcase, turning up at a mathematician’s door and declaring “My brain is open”. The unspoken deal Erdős offered was that his host would house, feed and generally care for him for a few days, and in return they would receive the chance to collaborate on some world-class mathematics.

Much of the lore around Erdős was laid down in The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, a biography of Erdős by Paul Hoffman that was published shortly after the mathematician’s death. I first read it as a teenager and utterly adored it, but I feel that its potential to reach a much wider audience has been criminally underappreciated, which is why this column marks the start of my official campaign to have it made into a film – starring none other than Jeff Goldblum.

Why Goldblum? Superficially, he and Erdős share a remarkable resemblance, and Goldblum of course already has one iconic mathematician role under his belt in the form of Ian Malcom from the Jurassic Park franchise. But I think it goes deeper than that – Goldblum’s brand of weird eccentricity is a perfect match for the way Erdős lived his life.

Take his approach to religion. Erdős was a self-declared atheist, and yet frequently referred to God, who he named the “Supreme Fascist”, or “SF”. He would say that the SF owned a book, or rather “the Book”, which contained all possible mathematical theorems, proved in the most elegant way. His life’s mission was to recreate the proofs from this mighty tome, stealing them out from under the SF.

Erdős also excelled at pithy turns of phrase. He referred to children as “epsilons”, for the Greek letter often used in mathematics to denote a small quantity. If an acquaintance quit mathematics, he said that they had “died” – those who had actually died had merely “left”, in his mind. Another favourite was “A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems,” although he nicked that one from his fellow Hungarian mathematician Alfréd Rényi. I can already imagine this dialogue tumbling out of Goldblum’s mouth.

Another fun part of the Erdős story already has a Hollywood connection. Because he had so many collaborators, mathematicians like to show off their “Erdős number” – the number of hops it takes to get back to him when you trace networks of paper authorship. In other words, people who worked directly with Erdős have an Erdős number of 1, while people who worked with these close associates are a 2, and so on. My Erdős number is 3, if I cheat a little bit – I haven’t written any mathematical papers, but I have written a number of articles in which I’ve interviewed and quoted Terence Tao at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has an Erdős number of 2. That sort of counts, right?

Anyway, this is remarkably similar to a game called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, which attempts to map the connections between actors, centring on the star of Footloose and dozens of other movies. If you’ve acted in a film with Bacon, you have a Bacon number of 1, and so on. Goldblum, incidentally, has a Bacon number of 1 because both actors starred in a cycling mockumentary called Tour de Pharmacy, though I can’t say I had heard of it before starting this campaign.

A few very special people bridge these two worlds, holding a coveted Erdős–Bacon number, which is simply the sum of your Erdős and Bacon numbers – you must have both to qualify. Generally, these include mathematicians who have made cameos in films or actors that authored a paper while at university. The current record for the lowest Erdős–Bacon number is 3, held since 1997 by one of Erdős’s collaborators, the mathematician Daniel Kleitman, who appeared as an extra in Good Will Hunting – the cast of which has many close connections to Bacon. But if Goldblum can find a mathematician with an Erdős number of 1 to write a paper with him, he could match that record. There isn’t much time left though, as anyone with an Erdős number of 1 that is still alive is also getting on a bit – Hungarian mathematician Lajos Pósa, who worked with Erdős as a teenager, is the youngest I could find at the age of 78.

So far, I’ve painted a fairly fun picture of Erdős, but it is also worth pointing out his flaws. Although not described as such in The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, Erdős was clearly sexist, referring to women and men as “bosses” and “slaves”, while to be married was to be “captured” – though it should be said he was happy to collaborate with female mathematicians. His habit of turning up at people’s homes unannounced and uninvited was not exactly in keeping with social norms, and I’m sure there must have been times when a mathematician (or their family) opened their door to the scruffy Erdős and thought “Argh, not this guy again!”.

Another knock against my dream of an Erdős biopic is that it leans fully into the “absent-minded professor” stereotype of mathematicians, and do we really need another story that reinforces such stereotypes, potentially putting people off from enjoying mathematics? I’m sympathetic to that argument, but I’ll dismiss it for two reasons.

The first is that all the major mathematical biopics to date have been serious affairs – think A Beautiful Mind, about John Nash, or The Man Who Knew Infinity, which tells the story of Srinivasa Ramanujan (as it happens, it was in my review of the latter where I first floated the idea of Goldblum as Erdős). A comedy maths biopic just hasn’t been tried before.

The second is that Erdős has left a legacy of unsolved problems of varying degrees, some of which even come with a cash reward for solving. These problems surely deserve a wider airing amongst puzzle-minded folk, and indeed there is currently a fascinating renaissance underway in which amateurs are using AI-assisted tools to make real progress in them. Erdős would almost certainly approve of a film that helped spread his gospel further, encouraging people to pick up a pencil (or chatbot) and continue his eternal battle against the Supreme Fascist in an attempt to decipher the Book. Jeff, if you (or your agent!) are reading this, give me a call – I’m ready and willing to help get this made.