7,500 forint – Pál Erdős

Pál Erdős is one of the most outstanding mathematicians of the 20th century. As a child prodigy, he was already able to do multiplications with three-digit numbers and explored the realm of negative numbers on his own at the age of 4. At an early age, he became world famous for proposing a remarkably simple and elegant proof of the Chebyshev's theorem, i.e. every number greater than one and twice is a prime number. He is one of the most distinguished figures in the research and application of combinatorics, both nationally and internationally. In 1983, in the 70th year of his life, he was awarded the Wolf Prize in Mathematics for his many achievements in number theory, combinatorics, probability theory, set theory and analysis, and for his influence on mathematicians around the world. On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of receiving the prize, the MNB is issuing the second piece in a series of collector coins named ‘Wolf Prize-Winning Mathematicians of Hungarian Descent’.