On 10/14/06, Fastfission <fastfission(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 10/14/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email)
<alphasigmax(a)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.
FF
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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.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com