Comment by magicalist
2 hours ago
Erdos never had a list of all the problems he posed, and the people who have compiled lists at times had to do guesswork for what were actually problems or not. So there is no precise list of Erdos problems, just to be clear.
What I think you might be missing, though, is that Erdos was inherently playful with these problems. He'd sometimes just drop in the middle of a paper "hey, this variant of this lemma is neat, I bet it's true, but I'll give cash to anyone who disproves it" and move on. Or challenge a colleague while visiting and collaborating with them, and the problem would get spread by word of mouth. The problems often weren't things he thought long and hard about individually, but they appealed to his sense of aesthetics and curiosity and play. I think that's maybe close to what Bloom is talking about there. It's handy to have a catalog, but fundamentally, creating a set of unsolved math problems was not what Erdos was doing.
https://www.sfu.ca/~mohar/Erdos.html
> He would also muse about the perfect death. It would occur just after a lecture, when he had just finished presenting a proof and a cantankerous member of the audience would have raised a hand to ask, "What about the general case?" In response, Erdos used to say, he would reply, "I think I'll leave that to the next generation," and fall over dead.