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