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.
FF