I listened to Moshe Vardi’s World Logic Day [1] talk “From Aristotle to the iPhone” [2] (recording to be released later). The chain of influences was quite illuminating.
That made me think of how I fit into the world of mathematics. I know I had calculated my ErdÅ‘s number at one point, but I couldn’t find it anymore. I myself haven’t authored any mathematics papers, of course, but there are computer scientists who bridge that gap.
So I used a list of Erdős collaborators [3], which I confirmed using the MathSciNet tool [4]. Then I used a similar tool for computer scientists from csauthors.net [5].
It turns out my ErdÅ‘s numbers is at most 4 (I didn’t check all of ErdÅ‘s’ collaborators, so it could be lower, although I find that unlikely).
Here’s the collaboration chain:
4. Mathias Ricken [6] co-authored Vivek Sarkar [7] co-authored Nimrod Megiddo [8] co-authored Miklós Ajtai [9] co-authored 1 paper [10] with
0. Paul Erdős [11]
Small, small world.
Update:
Turns out I didn’t have to do any of this search manually. My author page on csauthors.net [6] already states:
Collaborative distances:
Dijkstra number of four.
Erdős number of four.
