Showing posts with label Erdős. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Erdős. Show all posts

08 August, 2010

Erdős number

There's this concept of an Erdős number for an academic author: take the graph of academic authors where two authors are joined together if they have written a paper together; then your Erdős number is the number of hops from you to the currently deceased mathematician Paul Erdős.

I first read about him a decade ago in The Man Who Loved Only Numbers but I've never got round to actually computing my number 'till now.

Borja Sotomayor shares a co-author with me (Ian Foster), so my number is less than or equal to his. He is number 6, so my number is ≤6, through this chain:

Ben Clifford → Ian T. Foster → Patrick H. Worley → Robert S. Schreiber → John Russell Gilbert → Roger C. Entringer → Paul Erdös

(p.s. its hard to type the ő in Erdős. Its not ö, although it looks like it)