| Erdős Number |
Article Index for Erdős |
Website Links For Number |
Information AboutErdős Number |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT ERDőS NUMBER | |
| social networks | |
| mathematics literature | |
| academic publishing | |
|
An author's Erdős number is defined Inductively as follows:
Erdős wrote around 1500 mathematical articles in his lifetime, mostly co-authored. He had 509 direct collaborators; these are the people with Erdős number 1. The people who have collaborated with them (but not with Erdős himself) have an Erdős number of 2 (6,984 people), those who have collaborated with people who have an Erdős number of 2 (but not with Erdős or anyone with an Erdős number of 1) have an Erdős number of 3, and so forth. Erdős numbers have been a part of the folklore of mathematicians throughout the world for many years. Amongst all working mathematicians at the turn of the millennium, the numbers range up to 15, but the average is less than 5, and almost everyone with a finite Erdős number has a number less than 8. Due to the increasing amount of interdisciplinary collaboration that crosses subdisciplines, it is possible that a substantial fraction of all working scientists who have published many papers with collaborators have finite Erdős numbers -- even in fields that may seem very distant from Pure Mathematics . For instance, if a Statistician who has a finite Erdős number collaborates with some pharmacologists in the analysis of a clinical trial, now all these pharmacologists will have finite Erdős numbers, as will by extension all who collaborated with them on other publications. According to Alex Lopez-Ortiz, all the Fields and Nevanlinna prize winners during the three cycles in 1986 to 1994 have Erdős number at most 9. The Bacon Number (as in the Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon ) is an application of the same idea to the movie industry, connecting actors that appeared in a film together to the actor Kevin Bacon . Jerry Grossman , Marc Lipman , and Eddie Cheng have been looking at some questions in pure Graph Theory motivated by these collaboration graphs. Also, Michael Barr suggests "rational Erdős numbers", generalizing the idea that a person who has written p joint papers with Erdős should be assigned Erdős number 1/p. From the collaboration multigraph of the second kind (although he also has a way to deal with the case of the first kind) -- with one edge between two mathematicians for ''each'' joint paper they have produced -- form an electrical network with a one-ohm resistor on each edge. The total resistance between two nodes tells how "close" these two nodes are. On . The final bid was $1,031, though apparently the winning bidder had no intention to pay [http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2004/04/21/decrease_your_erdos_number.html . The winner (who already had an Erdős number of 3) considered it a "mockery", and said "papers have to be worked and earned, not sold, auctioned or bought". Another ) about skill in the World Series Of Poker and the World Poker Tour . It closed on 22 July 2004 with a winning bid of $127.40. This is noteworthy because with the exception of a few co-authored articles to be published posthumously, 2 is the minimum number that can now be achieved. It is jokingly said that Baseball Hall Of Famer Hank Aaron has an Erdős number of 1 because they both autographed the same baseball when Emory University awarded them honorary degrees on the same day. Earlier mathematicians published fewer papers than modern ones, and more rarely published jointly-authored papers. The earliest person known to have a finite Erdős number is either and Carl Friedrich Gauss do not have finite Erdős numbers. SEE ALSO
REFERENCES EXTERNAL LINKS
|
|
|