On 10/14/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/14/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
Not so. It's a lot like actor's Bacon numbers: Meeting someone is one thing, but co-author a mathematical paper or acting alongside them is slightly less trivial than that.
I think the equivalence with the Kevin Bacon "degrees of separation" is a good one, but I don't think it speaks for its lack of triviality. I don't think we should start categorizing actors by their degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon, either, and I don't think we should categorize people based on their degrees of publication separation from Paul Erdos.
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It's fundamentally trivial (in nature), however it's also excessively popular, in the sense that any serious mathematician seems to know their Erdos number. It's not a focus of serious discussion, but it's part of the field's internal folklore.
I think that they're so well known and so common that they are simply too notable not to have articles about, even though they're trivial.