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 After graduating in 1965 at János BolyaiHigh School, Budapest, he went on to study Chemistry at Eötvös Loránd University and Chemical Cybernetics at Budapest University of Technology and Economics where he completed Master's degrees in both disciplines. Eventually, in 1991 he received Doctor of Science for his paper on "Kinetics of Chemical and Biological Networks". 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 US held patents. In 1995 he began to hold a position as a University Professor at University of Debrecen and later, also at Budapest University of Technology and Economics. In between 1999-2002, he served as Széchenyi Professor at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. After leaving Hungary and moving to the United States in 2002, he began his career as the Henry R. Luce Professor of Complex Systems Studies at Kalamazoo College.. He has been awarded by the 2018 Florence J. Lucasse Fellowship for Excellence in Scholarship. Érdi also prides himself as the co-founder and co-director of BSCS, which is a Hungarian study program for undergraduate students, mainly from USA, that are interested in Cognitive Science and its disciplines.
ELMOHA
In 1990, Érdi established with János Tóth the informal organization ELMOHA 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. 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.
