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As we know Erdos has proposed a considerable number of problems in the "American Mathematical Monthly" journal. Is there any published summary of Erdos's published problems in the American Mathematical Monthly journal?

Thank you!

Andrés E. Caicedo
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Martin Bokner
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2 Answers2

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I do not know of such a summary. But JSTOR has spent considerable time indexing the Monthly, including the "Problems and Solutions" sections. So if your library has a JSTOR subscription you can search for these. (Access it on-line through your library. Or in person on a terminal at your library.)

Searching Author Erdos and Publication Title American Mathematical Monthly, I got 304 matches. Some of those may be actual articles by Erdos, but most of them are solutions in the Problems and Solutions section. If Erdos was the proposer, it should be indexed in this way.

For example, May 1961:

problem

Gerald Edgar
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I do not think that anyone ever made an effort to collect ALL problems of Erdos. In the later part of his life he liked to give talks on various conferences under the title "My favorite unsolved problems" (I recomend typing this on Google, there are many versions). But usually these collections were selected according to the topic of the conference.

EDIT. In general, his problems are widely scattered. In the last years of his life he was mostly interested in graphs and combinatorics. But I know, for example, a collection of Erdos's problems in complex analysis dated 1964, and included in the book of W. Hayman "Research Problems in Function theory". This example shows that it would be very difficult to collect them all. A person searching for "Erdos problems" is unlikely to find a book like this.

Alexandre Eremenko
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  • Soifer has tried. He has written extensively, in his usual fashion, of this project. – Andrés E. Caicedo Sep 01 '17 at 18:05
  • Is this published/available? – Alexandre Eremenko Sep 01 '17 at 18:09
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    Not yet. It was meant to appear last month, I believe; it was advertised in Springer catalogues, but there seem to be some delays and the ad disappeared. – Andrés E. Caicedo Sep 01 '17 at 18:15
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    It seems he is changing the scope of the project, though. This is from a recent interview: "His current work includes “Problems of pgom Erdös,” a book about “the greatest problem creator of all time, and also friend, coauthor, and mentor,” Paul Erdös, who personally selected his favorite open problems for the upcoming publication." See here. – Andrés E. Caicedo Sep 01 '17 at 18:21
  • Is it common knowledge what "pgom" stands for? – Todd Trimble Sep 02 '17 at 00:01
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    @Todd Not really. It is a joke. Erdős used to complain for comedic effect about his old age. At some point in his 50s he started to add at the end of his signature the acronym P.G.O.M., meaning "Poor great old man". From then on he would add further acronyms every few years. – Andrés E. Caicedo Sep 02 '17 at 00:12
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    Here is Paul Erdös PGOM LD AD LD CD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJCQP1DTAOM (see the first few minutes). – Péter Komjáth Sep 02 '17 at 12:59