Paul Erdős's
Work Algorithms

A bibliographic reconstruction of Erdős's mathematical operating system from papers, book chapters, problem papers, and collaborative publications. Each case is treated as a lecture-level thesis/result rather than a reproduced paper. Strategy tags are overlapping: percentages report case prevalence, so totals need not sum to 100%.

Erdős Number Project spine300-case corpus33 reconstructed strategiesoverlapping prevalence histograms
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Research-page premise

Erdős's work repeatedly converts a problem into a compact combinatorial or arithmetical obstruction: a density threshold, a forbidden configuration, a probabilistic existence estimate, a divisibility poset, a Ramsey dichotomy, or a collaboration-ready conjecture. This page reconstructs that operating system as a decision tree over a uniformly sampled corpus of 300 publication-level cases drawn from the Grossman bibliography.

The reconstruction intentionally avoids full-text reproduction. It uses bibliographic titles and derived thesis/result summaries as the observable layer, then infers strategy tags as a probabilistic ensemble.

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Thirty-three reconstructed strategies

Click a strategy card to see the working rule, formula schema, and evidence sample.

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Overlapping prevalence ranking

Percentages mean “share of the 300 cases tagged with this strategy.” Strategies are not mutually exclusive; because each case carries three tags, totals may exceed 100%.

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300 publication / chapter-style cases

#YearPublication / lecture caseDomainThesis / resultStrategies
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Worked demonstrations

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Source spine