Érdi was born in 1946 in Budapest, Hungary. He was the only son of Pál Érdi, a chief engineer at the tannery factory and Magdolna Friedmann, an office manager at the journal Nagyvilág. He has two children and two grandchildren. His mentors were Pál Benedek and
János Szentágothai[6]
In 2002, he and his family moved to Michigan, USA where he holds the Henry R. Luce professorship at Kalamazoo College while he kept his position in his home institution in Budapest.
Career
In 1992, Érdi began working as a scientific advisor of the KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He filled the role of the leading scientist on the project Big Data. Érdi's team was working on a method of predicting future technologies by analysing historical data of (mainly) US held patents.[7][8][9]
Érdi also prides himself as the co-founder and co-director of BSCS (Budapest Semester in Cognitive Sciences), which is a Hungarian study program for undergraduate students, mainly from USA, that are interested in Cognitive Science and its disciplines.[13]
ELMOHA
In 1990, Érdi established with János Tóth the informal organization ELMOHA (Hungarian acronym of the three words: Theory,
Model, Tradition) with the primary goal of the group to establish a proper discussion between humanities and natural sciences. A group of intellectuals from various fields of sciences and humanities met up regularly and discussed science and the interpretations of science.
Early members of the group were Péter Balassa, János László Farkas, Péter Hraskó, György Kampis, József Lázár, János Malina, László Ropolyi, Róbert Schiller, Péter Marton.[14] Also psychologist and linguist Csaba Pléh and Gábor Hraskó who is the president of Hungarian Skeptics Society, have also attended on several ELMOHA meetings.
These meetings are often the subject of newspaper articles, books and university courses.
Memberships
Editorial and Programme Advisory Board of the Springer Complexity publishing program [15]