Bow down all before me...

[compilerbitch]

... for, according to the American Mathematical Society, I have an Erdös number of 5.

The chain goes Me → Alan Mycroft → Richard A. O'Keefe → Leon Sterling → Nicholas C. Wormald → Paul Erdös.

Woohoo!

(for those of you who don't know what on earth I'm talking about, look here)

Edit: I have been playing a bit with the AMS web site. It seems I have an Alan Turing number of 7, a Carl Friedrich Gauss number of 9 and a Catherine Greenhill number of 5 (not that many of you know here, but galliana knows her well).

Comments

[drswirly.livejournal.com]

Aha, mine is 4.

Me -> Marcus du Sautoy -> Alex Lubotzky -> Laszlo Babai -> Paul Erdos

A few friends have said they want to write a paper with me about any arbitrary thing, just to get their own Erdos number. That could be fun.

[doseybat.livejournal.com]

*goes pale*
*faints*
i have seen a ghost! do you really exist in a livejournal incarnation?? *boggles* *faints again*

[drswirly.livejournal.com]

You see? I say a couple of sentences and people start passing out. And then others wonder why I don't write actual diary entries...

(Actually, I just like saying "Laszlo Babai".)

[doseybat.livejournal.com]

gosh, a reccuring ghostie! *fascinated* why Laszlo Babai? (*complete lack of appropriate cultural reference*)

[drswirly.livejournal.com]

Oh, there's no particular reference - it's just a fun name to say.

[fluffymark]

Isn't an Erdös number of 5 the most common? (for published mathematicians)

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Yeah, probably, but I think it's quite cool to have one at all. Allow me a slight squee for having noticed it (although I am about 2 years late in realising!)

[simont]

Only marginally more common than 4.

Hmm. Last time I looked at that page, ISTR it said there was one single mathematician with the highest Erdős number of 14. I remember thinking at the time that he must be really proud of that, but that it's much harder to maintain than a low number: he was probably scared that someone on his minimal chain would collaborate with someone lower down and reduce his number. (And the chance of him collaborating with anyone was probably tiny.) But today the page says the highest is 13, which presumably means this has now happened.

[foibey.livejournal.com]

Wow. Hardcore. *jealous, although mostly pointlessly owing to currently being a crap mathematician*

[darcydodo]

I know some people with pretty darn high Erdös numbers. ;)

[hsenag.livejournal.com]

3 here (Me -> Keedwell -> {Denes,Hsu} -> Erdös). I wonder how much that'd be worth on eBay? :-)

[otterylexa.livejournal.com]

I was wondering what mine would be, so I went looking, but it doesn't look like the paper I was named as an author on (somewhat cheekily, I didn't do much for it) ever actually got published... Oh well.

[ko.livejournal.com]

One of my math teachers (the lone female math prof I've ever had) has a No. 1! She's wicked smart too.

[purplepiano.livejournal.com]

5 here as well, by various paths!

[purplepiano.livejournal.com]

But it would be four if it counted "supervised a PhD by, but with no other publications" as a collaboration, which it should do really.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I suspect there are enough mathematicians shading into the theoretical end of bioinformatics that it might actually be worth searching fro mine at some point.

fwiw, I'm three degrees from Kevin Bacon in the formal sense, though very few things are as cool as jonsinger's story of playing "six degrees" with Kevin Bacon's brother while Kevin Bacon looked on, mildly bemused. [ And I've had jonsinger stay at my house. ] It also occurs to me that like many Cantabrigians who drink at the Castle I'm nominally two degrees of separation from the Beatles and the Pythons, and I can also claim that to Bill Clinton two ways, Syd Barrett, as well as the normal congoers' run of cool writerly people.

[x-mass.livejournal.com]

were supposed to be with you in half an hour but were being delayed hope to get to you soon.
sorry about this
kate