I looked this up in a database after being credited on a paper: a co-author Li Zhang has an Erdos number of 2, which puts me at 3.
If you count video games, I have a Bacon number of 3 because I was credited on Tiger Woods 2003-2005 with an artist named Sylvain Doreau, who is credited on Shrek. John Lithgow was in Shrek and in Footloose with Kevin Bacon.
So that gives 3+3 = 6. If only it were worth anything in real life :)
Erdős numbers are kind of meaningless these days, as the internet has made widespread collaborations easy. For example, if you are an established person in algorithms or bioinformatics, your Erdős number is probably 3. There are a still some 2s around, and keeping your number at 4 or higher takes deliberate effort.
Huh, the search tools have improved since I last looked, it found a 5-path for me (and from the notes, that route has existed since the early 1990s, but last time I looked it didn't turn up. I remember assuming a good path would probably be through a particular coauthor who, according to csauthors.net, turns out to be a 6 via me instead :-)
I will have one, assuming the paper I just submitted gets accepted and published! (And I guess I already have one—JuliaCon journal is just dragging their feet with reviewing.)
This is one of the better tools (an actually-academic friend of mine complained that one of the other ones gives an 8-hop path to one of their immediate coauthors - but notes that csauthors does seem to have occasional trouble assuming the same name means the same person.)
Huh I figured I didn't have an Erdos number because I only incidentally became a second author on like one or two papers during my time in an Uni lab.
I do remember a conversation with one of the professors in my lab who wanted me to talk to one of my other professors (Odlyzko) about finding a paper topic. Which I thought was weird because it's a totally different field, but turns out Odlyzko has an Erdos number of 1, and that was the whole motivation, lol. Nothing came of it. But for some reason that interaction had me mis-remember that I didn't have an Erdos number at all.
But apparently anyone who's ever published an article anywhere has an Erdos number, so mine is 6.
I could have Erdős number 3. I have only written one peer reviewed mathematical paper, which I had reviewed by one of my teachers, Frits Göbel, who has Erdős number 2, if I am not mistaken. At that time, I was not aware of this. If I had asked him as co-author of the paper, which would have made sense, because the paper was a generalisation of some of his research, I would have gotten Erdős number 3.
I have an Erdos number of the first type[0] of 2, and of the second type[1] of 3.
Depending on how you measure things I may have a Bacon number, but it needs to go via TV episodes, and it's quite large. I'm idly considering trying to get a "proper" Bacon number.
[0] The usual one
[1] Where you only count papers that have exactly two authors
A person's Stalin number is how many encounters is one away from Stalin. I worked with a person whose grandfather was a close associate of Tito, who had met Stalin in person.
Encounter is too small for notability. We all have six degree of separation after all. Erdos number is specifically publishing paper, which is much harder. Just like its variants like Bacon number for producing films.
That's a myth. In the original experiment, AFAIR, while the average distance between any two people in the world was 6 persons, the number of successfully completed chains of connection was very small[1].
Encounters make this far too easy. (Though it also helps that I'm from Finland.)
Path 1: When I was a kid, Raisa Gorbacheva visited our school. I didn't talk to her personally, but some people I knew did. Due to her position, I'm fairly sure she knew many people who knew Stalin.
Path 2: Because I was involved in student politics, I know some Finnish politicans and have met many more. Some of them must have met Putin, but I'm not completely sure who. Putin's grandfather Spiridon Putin was a chef for both Lenin and Stalin.
Path 3: I have mutual friends with former Finnish politician Erkki Tuomioja. His grandmother was Hella Wuolijoki, who was likely a Soviet spy, was married for a while to a personal friend of Lenin, and claimed to have met Stalin in the 1930s.
