For fun
Erdős–Bacon Number
My Erdős number is 3, my Bacon number is at most 3, so my Erdős–Bacon number is 6.
Erdős Numbers
Paul Erdős was one of the most prolific mathematicians of the 20th century, known for having many collaborators. This gave rise to the notion of the Erdős number, a measure of degrees of separation from Erdős. Paul Erdős has an Erdős number of 0. If you have written a paper with Paul Erdős you have an Erdős number of 1. Inductively, your Erdős number is one plus the minimum of the Erdős numbers of all of your coauthors.
The AMS has a tool for mathematicians to calculate their Erdős number.
My Erdős number is 3. I wrote a paper with Alia Hamieh, who wrote a paper with Ram Murty, who wrote a paper with Paul Erdős.
Bacon Numbers
There is the notion of six degrees from Kevin Bacon, which leads to the analogous notion of a Bacon number. Kevin Bacon has a Bacon number of 0. If you have been in a movie with Kevin Bacon, you have a Bacon number of 1. In general, your Bacon number is one plus the minimum of the Bacon numbers of all the people you have been in a movie with.
As a child, I was into theatre and had the honor of being an extra in the movie Mandie and the Forgotten Christmas (you can see me dancing in the background at the 1:32:30 mark).
Thanks to my sister, who pointed out while we were watching Jurassic World that Kelly Washington was in that movie, I can calculate my Bacon number (or at least bound it above) by 3:
- Steven Creech was in Mandie and the Forgotten Christmas with Kelly Washington.
- Kelly Washington was in Jurassic World with Chris Pratt.
- Chris Pratt was in The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special with Kevin Bacon.
Erdős–Bacon Numbers
An Erdős–Bacon number is the sum of someone's Erdős number and Bacon number. It is meant for those who have overlapped in the math world and the movie world. Thus I am one of the few who has an Erdős–Bacon number, and mine is 6. Not too shabby. This is the same Erdős–Bacon number as Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, Noam Chomsky, Bill Gates, Danica McKellar, and Colin Firth. Furthermore, it seems from Wikipedia that there are only four other people in the world with a smaller Erdős–Bacon number: Daniel Kleitman (3 = 1 + 2), Nicholas Metropolis (4 = 2 + 2), Albert M. Chan (4 = 3 + 1), and Sergey Brin (5 = 3 + 2).