ERDOS, `MONARCH' OF MATHEMATICS, AT 83.

Byline: The New York Times

Dr. Paul Erdos, a legendary mathematician who was so devoted to his subject that he lived as a mathematical pilgrim with no home and no job, died Friday in Warsaw, Poland. He was 83.

The cause of death was a heart attack, according to an e-mail message sent out this weekend by Dr. Miki Simonovits, a mathematician at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, who was a close friend.

Erdos (pronounced AIR-dosh), a Hungarian-American mathematician, was attending a mathematics meeting in Warsaw when he died, Simonovits reported.

The news, only now reaching the world's mathematicians, has come as a blow. Dr. Ronald L. Graham, the director of the information sciences research center at AT&T Laboratories, said, ``I'm getting e-mail messages from around the world, saying, `Tell me it isn't so.' ''

Never, mathematicians say, has there been an individual like Erdos. He was one of the century's greatest mathematicians, who posed and solved thorny problems in number theory and other areas and founded the field of discrete mathematics, which is the foundation of computer science. He was also one of the most prolific mathematicians in history, with more than 1,500 papers to his name. And, his friends say, he was also one of the most unusual.

Dr. Ernst Straus, who worked with both Albert Einstein and Erdos, wrote a tribute to Erdos shortly before his own death in 1983. He said of Erdos: ``In our century, in which mathematics is so strongly dominated by `theory doctors,' he has remained the prince of problem solvers and the absolute monarch of problem posers.''

Erdos ``is on the short list for our century,'' said Dr. Joel H. Spencer, a mathematician at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.