/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11755918
>>11755922
Erdos started popping pills in 1971 after his mom died.
People've actually analyzed charts of his publications. He did definitely write more papers after he started taking stimulants, and since he was getting old you can probably conclusively attribute that to meth letting him focus 18 hours a day.
They generally weren't as important as his earlier ones though (if you click through the "stuff named after Erdos" page on Wikipedia, you won't find a lot he did after 1970). But I don't think you can really place causality there, since most old mathematicians tend to no longer care whether or not they're doing "important" work.