Editing Paul Erdős (section)

=== Early Life: Cognitive Narrowing from the Start ===
Born in Budapest to Jewish parents, Erdős was raised in an intellectual household dominated by academic rituals and isolation. His two sisters died of scarlet fever before his birth, and his mother, traumatized, kept him out of school, raising him in strict domestic solitude.

From age four, he was '''calculating the ages of people by subtracting dates from one another'''—a classic example of '''hypernumeracy''' and '''early pattern fixation''', both core traits in Asperger development. He could manipulate large numbers in his head but showed little interest in toys, peer relationships, or physical play.

Like Newton, Darwin, and Wittgenstein, Erdős retreated into abstraction before developing a social self. He learned '''numbers as language''', not emotions.
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