Newsletter
Last edited: Nov. 8, 2008, 1:06 a.m. MST
Erdos number idea
One of the ways to know how high up on the famous-mathematician ladder you are is to calculate your Erdos number. Paul Erdos was certainly very prolific. It's basically a game of six degrees of Kevin Bacon, but played with math papers, instead of movies, and Paul Erdos, instead of Kevin Bacon.
What's interesting (or not, if you realize the ubiquity of small-world networks), is that the median Erdos number is just 5. What's even more interesting is that, according to the Erdos number project, the highest finite Erdos number is 13, with only 5 people in that state!
So, here's a more interesting game to me. Obviously I can't get an Erdos number of 1 (Paul Erdos is no longer among the living), and I suppose if I really dedicated my academic life to such a pursuit, I could probably reach some similarly low number. However, my interest sort of tapers off near the median (5), since that's common. What would be better is to be the 1 person with an Erdos number of 14! So, I need to write a paper with one of the 5 people that have an Erdos number of 13. More importantly, once I do, I can't screw it up by writing any papers with anyone else. Furthermore, I should probably choose the least likely of those 5 people to write more papers. I suppose I still have the problem in which any sub-path in the supposed full path from me to Erdos might collapse into a smaller path at any time. Hmm.
On a slightly related note, another interesting dimension is the intersection of the Erdos number and the Bacon number. The Erdos-Bacon number is the sum of someone's Erdos number and their Bacon number. Evidently the lowest such number is 3. Wikipedia's discussion on how a lower number could be achieved is hilarious. Observe:
The only way a lower number could be achieved would be:
* for an individual who had co-authored an academic paper with Paul Erdos to
appear in a movie with Kevin Bacon;
* for Bacon to co-author an academic paper with someone with an Erdos number
of 1, which would give Bacon an Erdos-Bacon number of 2;
* for anyone who appeared in the documentary N is a Number along with Erdos
to appear in a film with Bacon, which would posthumously give Erdos an
Erdos-Bacon number of 2;
* for Kevin Bacon to appear in a film that also uses stock footage of Erdos,
giving Erdos an Erdos-Bacon number of 1;
* for a heretofore unknown joint academic paper by Bacon and Erdos to be
published, giving Bacon an Erdos-Bacon number of 1.