“My brain is open!” These are the famous words that Paul Erdős spoke to the world’s foremost mathematicians as he surprised them at their doorsteps. Erdős, one of the world’s most prolific mathematicians, published over 1,500 papers in his lifetime with more than 500 collaborators. Fundamentally, Erdős believed that mathematics was a social activity; after turning up on his colleagues’ doorsteps, he would help them with their work for a few days before departing to collaborate with someone else.

Erdős was not much different than many hackathon hackers today. Hackathons are intense, open-ended competitions where attendees (hackers) work in teams to build new things and solve problems, all while surrounded by free food, swag, and mentors. Many hackers work on their projects all through the night, and most get little sleep — similarly, Erdős often worked 19 hour days, and loved to say that “a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.” Hackathons today cater especially to software developers and hardware hackers, and provide lots of tools and resources to help these hackers along through the weekend. But why not include mathematicians too?

This past weekend, I brought three of my most brilliant friends (all math majors) to HackMIT to prove that mathematics could be done at a hackathon. We set out to create an algorithm that could route cars more efficiently in surge traffic conditions; for example, surge traffic might be the traffic ensuing as thousands of spectators exit an arena, or the traffic created as millions of Floridians fled Hurricane Irma. With limited formal computer science education, we arrived at MIT unsure of ourselves but hopeful that we could succeed.