Dorky Poll: Euler or Erdos?

What, no euclid?

Euler, when it takes over 100 years to print all your papers, and their mostly of super high quality... He lived at the right time, but could be the greatest ever.

Erdos. I'm more into discrete math. Also, my Erdos number is at most 3.

Erdos - you gotta love all those Hungarian mathematicians (and physicists)

What if you used Napier's constant instead of Euler's number?

Euler... duh. Erdos was really smart and prolific too, but so is everyone at the top. Euler's work is more widely applicable -- his formula relating complex exponentials to sines and cosines, as just one example.

No comparison!

I'll have to give a slight advantage to Euler. His work is the cornerstone to so much of modern vector calculus, real and complex analysis, and by extension much of modern physics. While Erdos' work is littered around the edges of modern number theory, I can't really think of as many critical, foundational aspects to his work. While his work is also impressive, I think it hasn't yet had enough "bake time."

Euler. He shows up everywhere in math and physics. Also, he kept doing math even after being virtually blind.

Euler. He's so much better. No comparison.
BTW, should the voters declare their Erdos numbers? Mine is 4, despite a total lack of combinatorial skills.

Also, you could argue that Euler laid the foundations for graph theory and combinatorics of graphs with the Seven Bridges problem. So even where Erdos was at his best, Euler still could hold his own. That's not true in reverse.

Wow, I just figured out that my Erdös number is at most 6, and I'm in biology! (I'll vote for Erdös, but only because I liked his epitaph).

Euler for sure. His collected works are of insane proportions, even before you mention the children and the blindness.

Definitely Euler. Rumor has it that a number of theorems, equations, etc. are named after the second person to prove/discover them, as there would otherwise be too many named after Euler himself for anyone to keep track. (No, I don't mean that Euler's theorem, I mean this Euler's theorem.)

E-name: Erastosthenes the first mathematician to measure the circumference of the earth.

Euler, by far.

I mean, not to belittle him or anything, but do you ever notice that Erdos tends to get much more attention for his life and personality than for any particular mathematical achievement in which he was involved?

Euler. He shows up everywhere in math and physics.

He even shows up in Computer Science, by means of his algorithm for numerically solving differential equations (that's even without considering the graph theory stuff, as agnostic mentions). There are other people you can legitimately say made contributions to computer science despite living in the 1700s, but not very many.

E-name: Erastosthenes the first mathematician to measure the circumference of the earth.

And he did it by shoving a single stick in the ground, no less.

Now that's frugal engineering.

Euler!
Will the AMS,if it still exists in 300 years, devote an entire bulletin issue to Erdos? Hmmm...
As others above have mentioned, I think, they still haven't finished publishing all of Euler's papers. He was that good.

do you ever notice that Erdos tends to get much more attention for his life and personality than for any particular mathematical achievement in which he was involved?

I didn't want to mention this, but now that someone else has... ;)

If you look at Euler, the man, he offends just about every modern sensibility: deeply religious and literalist, politically reactionary, conventional in tastes, pumped out a bunch of kids, didn't get along well with Voltaire -- I mean, just the opposite of who a modern person wants to lionize as a hero. (Ditto for Gauss, more or less, so he won't do for a popular audience either!)

Erdos is childlike, quirky, more to the Left than Right, and unconventional / gypsy-like. Just who a touchy-feely progressive audience will fall in love with. All right, there, I said it.

Euler. It took longer before he "ceased to live and calculate."

Euler, fo'shizzle.

ObPulpFiction: "Dorks. They look like a couple of dorks."

"Ha-ha-ha. They're your clothes, MF-er."

Euler's direct contributions to physics (not just his indirect contributions via analysis, diff eqs, etc.) are massively underappreciated. A large part of what we think of as mechanics is his creation (this is especially true for rotational motion). Among his credits:

He the first to realize that conservation of momentum is an unrestricted principle applying to all physical systems and the first to distinguish angular momentum as a separately conserved quantity. He discovered and completely characterized the inertia tensor.

The basic results of wave mechanics all come from Euler and the Bernoullis (Newton barely touched the subject).

He laid the foundations for Lagrangian mechanics by being the first to describe physical systems in terms of constraints.

And his methodological contributions were deep as well. He was the first to systematically (1) treat directed magnitudes in component-wise fashion, and (2) use differential equations of motion as the basic characterization of systems.

And although no one would do anything with the observation for some time, in the first chapter of his Mechanics he notes that the laws of motion are invariant under Galilean transformations (not the term he used, but he described them correctly) and that there was no way to give operational meaning to the notion of an absolute reference frame. This was in 1728.

Euler. I never met him.

Even though my Erdos number is 4 and he's the entire reason why the \" character exists in LaTeX, Euler definitely wins; a disturbingly large number of mathematical arguments can be won by saying, "didn't Euler show that to be the case?"