[1][2] In his career he wrote several books and published (co-published) many scholarly articles in the fields of Chemical kinetics, Computational neuroscience and Complex systems[3][4][5] 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.

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.

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.

[10] 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.