The Theometry of Paul Erdős

Paul Erdős was no atheist; rather, he had an adversarial relationship to God.  He pictured the Creator as hoarding all the best math proofs in The Book, not wanting to share.   Life is basically a board game played against this miser;  and though we cannot win, we can strive to keep his winnings to a minimum.

The adversarial relationship recalls the tragic case of Lucifer; yet nothing else about Erdos seems actually diabolical.   For Erdős does not oppose the Lord head-on, but at a bias.  Simply, Erdős sees the Deity, not exactly through a glass darkly, but under some distortion -- perhaps a projective transformation.

Now, the same transformation must apply to the rest of the celestial denizens.  We may surmise the results.  The angels get recast as mathematicians (not much of a stretch).  And the Holy Spirit turns into the Friendly Ghost, the S.F.’s mischievous sidekick.   So soon as the Big Guy isn’t looking, Casper scurries off, say to rural India, where he finds the lad Ramanujan puzzled beside a hayrick.

“Psst! You know how, you take the reciprocals of the squares of all the integers, and sum them all up?” (Whisper whisper.)
Ramanujan, suddenly:  “I see it!  Pi-squared over six!”

[Update]  It turns out Heine already wrote a sort of sotie on much this theme:
Die Götter im Exil

[Morphological appendix]

He had studied theology.  But if theology and theosophy, then why not theography and theometry;  why not theognomy, theotrophy, theotomy, theogamy?  Why not theophysics and theo-chemistry?  Why not that ingenious toy, the theotrope?

-- Aldous Huxley, Antic Hay (1923), first page