"Steve Bennett" wrote
On 11/30/06, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com
Trouble is: I have checked that my own Erdos number is at most 4. Knowing that it is exactly 4, rather than 3, is equivalent to knowing a huge amount about collaborative papers ... which is a needle-in-haystack search.
No, it's really easy actually. Go to Wikipedia and check out [[Category:Erdos number 2]]. If you've worked on a paper with any of the people in it, you're 3. Otherwise, you're 4.
You're putting an awful lot of faith in the completeness and accuracy of our own information ... which in this case changes or should change every time one of a whole bunch of people publishes a preprint with a new collaborator. (By the way, do you update ENs at the preprint or journal publication stage, which might be years on?) It's a fun trivia game, but nightmarish, and EN2 is really the maximum we should allow on the site.
Charles
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On 11/30/06, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com
You're putting an awful lot of faith in the completeness and accuracy of our own information ... which in this case changes or should change every time one of a whole bunch of people publishes a preprint with a new collaborator. (By the way, do you update ENs at the preprint or journal publication stage, which might be years on?) It's a fun trivia game, but nightmarish, and EN2 is really the maximum we should allow on the site.
Heh, I wasn't being serious. The Erdos number 1's might be interesting - there are probably hundreds of those, given that he produced something like 650 papers and rarely worked alone. But I wouldn't go beyond that as a category. Even a list of Erdos numbers would be of pretty marginal value as it would be unlikely to be complete, even for low numbers.
Steve