Erdős–Bacon number
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Erdős–Bacon number
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Re: Erdős–Bacon number
#2It took me a while to understand xkcd #599[1]; now I'm wondering what the current lower bound on someone's Erdős–Bacon Number is today. Anyone know?
Re: Erdős–Bacon number
#3It took me a while to understand xkcd #599[1]; now I'm wondering what the current lower bound on someone's Erdős–Bacon Number is today. Anyone know? [1]: https://www.xkcd.com/599/
Can you ELI5 both? I don't get it.
Re: Erdős–Bacon number
#4When I read this, I immediately began thinking if there is someone I know who has been involved in both science/math and TV/movies and the name that popped up for me was Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan has Erdos-Bacon number of 6.
Re: Erdős–Bacon number
#5It took me a while to understand xkcd #599[1]; now I'm wondering what the current lower bound on someone's Erdős–Bacon Number is today. Anyone know? [1]: https://www.xkcd.com/599/
Can you ELI5 both? I don't get it.
To get the lowest Erdos number you have to co-author a paper with him but he is dead so that is no longer possible. Unless...
Re: Erdős–Bacon number
#6It took me a while to understand xkcd #599[1]; now I'm wondering what the current lower bound on someone's Erdős–Bacon Number is today. Anyone know? [1]: https://www.xkcd.com/599/
Can you ELI5 both? I don't get it.
Someone's "Bacon" number is how many films you have to go through in order to go from that person to Kevin Bacon. For example Patrick Stewart's Bacon number is 2. Star Trek: First Contact -[James Cromwell]-> Beyond All Boundaries -> Kevin Bacon.
Someone's Erdős number is the same concept, but applied to coauthorship on research papers.
Someone's Erdős-Bacon number is the sum of those two numbers.
Re: Erdős–Bacon number
#7Erdős–Bacon numbers got their start when Simon Singh (reference 1 archived) was having lunch with me, and I observed that mine was 4. He writes for a living, so he wrote a column.
Oddly, I was long ago written out of this Wikipedia article.
There is a reasonable ambiguity about Erdős numbers, as people do publish posthumously with him, based on collaborations while he was alive.
There is also an ambiguity about Bacon numbers. One can take the spirit of the original dorm room bull sessions that started Bacon numbers, or one can take the idiosyncrasies as gospel of the web site that now reports Bacon numbers. For example, a mathematician can appear as themself in a documentary, and gain a Bacon number according to this web site. They defend this by observing that these mathematicians did experience film sets (so do caterers) but the reality is that it's too hard to clean the data. I've been interviewed multiple times for documentaries, and the experience bears no resemblance whatsoever to that of working on and acting in "A Beautiful Mind". The original intent was to count actors with credited speaking roles.
Re: Erdős–Bacon number
#8It took me a while to understand xkcd #599[1]; now I'm wondering what the current lower bound on someone's Erdős–Bacon Number is today. Anyone know? [1]: https://www.xkcd.com/599/
Can you ELI5 both? I don't get it.
Re: Erdős–Bacon number
#9It took me a while to understand xkcd #599[1]; now I'm wondering what the current lower bound on someone's Erdős–Bacon Number is today. Anyone know? [1]: https://www.xkcd.com/599/
Well, Erdos is dead, so you'd have to be in a movie with one of the two people who have a EB number of 3, giving you an EB number of 5. Otherwise, if one of the people who have published a paper with Erdos were in a movie with Kevin Bacon, that would lower their number to two. Somebody born today couldn't do better than 5, and they'd have to move quickly. Kleitman is in his late 80s and Reznik is 66.
Re: Erdős–Bacon number
#10Erdős–Bacon numbers got their start when Simon Singh (reference 1 archived) was having lunch with me, and I observed that mine was 4. He writes for a living, so he wrote a column. Oddly, I was long ago written out of this Wikipedia article. There is a reasonable ambiguity about Erdős numbers, as people do publish posthumously with him, based on collaborations while he was alive. There is also an ambiguity about Bacon…
Yup. I have an Erdős number, but despite being a Bacon, no Bacon number to my great dismay.