N Is a Number: A Portrait of Paul Erdős, the Most Prolific Mathematician of the 20th Century

For any­one who enjoyed Dan­ger­ous Knowl­edge (the BBC’s 90-minute doc­u­men­tary that takes a close look at four math­e­mati­cians – Georg Can­tor, Lud­wig Boltz­mann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Tur­ing), we bring you this — N Is a Num­ber: A Por­trait of Paul Erdős. Filmed in 1993 by direc­tor George Paul Csic­sery, the doc­u­men­tary revis­its the intel­lec­tu­al con­tri­bu­tions of Paul Erdös (1913–1996), per­haps the most pro­lif­ic math­e­mati­cian of the last cen­tu­ry. The Hun­gar­i­an-born thinker appar­ent­ly pub­lished more papers than any oth­er math­e­mati­cian in record­ed his­to­ry and solved seem­ing­ly unsolv­able prob­lems in graph the­o­ry and num­ber the­o­ry. Run time is 57 min­utes. You can pur­chase a copy online here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Break­ing the Code, Fea­tur­ing Derek Jaco­bi as Alan Tur­ing

Math­e­mat­ics in Movies: Har­vard Prof Curates 150+ Scenes