Paul Erdös (1913-1996) is one of the most prolific mathmeticians. He wrote about 1500 papers in his lifetime. He collaborated with over 500 people. As a tribute, his friends created the Erdös number.
Erdös himself has an Erdös number of 0. A co-author with Erdös has an Erdös number of 1, if you have written a paper with one of those co-authors you have an Erdös number of 2.
My Erdös number is 3 (unless anybody knows differently), via these papers.
These papers (at least) were co-authored by Paul Erdös and Nathan Linial
- Aharoni R., Erdös P. and Linial N. (1988) Optima of Dual Integer Linear Programs. Combinatorica, 8(1):13-20 (doi: 10.1007/BF02122549)
- Erdös P., Linial N. and Moran S.(1987) External problems on permutations under cyclic equivalence. Discrete Mathematics, 64(1):1-11 (doi: 10.1016/0012-365X(87)90235-)
Nathan Linial has an Erdös number of 1
These papers (at least) were co-authored by Nathan Linial and Amotz Bar-noy
- Alon N, Bar-noy A., Linial N. and Peleg D. (1992) Single round simulation on radio networks, Journal of Algorithms, 13(2):188-210 (doi: 10.1016/0196-6774(92)90015-5)
- Alon N, Bar-noy A., Linial N. and Peleg D. (1991) A lower bound for radio broadcast, Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 43(2):290-298 (doi: 10.1016/0022-0000(91)90015-W)
- Awerbuch B, Bar-noy A., Linial N. and Peleg D. (1990) Improved routing strategies with succinct tables, Journal of Algorithms, 11(3):307-341 (doi: 10.1016/0196-6774(90)90017-9)
- Awerbuch B, Bar-noy A., Linial N. and Peleg D. (1989) Compact distributed data structures for adaptive routing, Proceedings of the twenty-first annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing (STOC '89), 479-489 (doi: 10.1145/73007.73053)
- Alon N, Bar-noy A., Linial N. and Peleg D. (1989) On the complexity of radio communication, Proceedings of the twenty-first annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing (STOC '89), 274-285 (doi: 10.1145/73007.73033)
- Bar-noy A., Borodin A., Karchmer M., Linial N. and Werman M. (1989) Bounds on Universal Sequences, SIAM Journal on Computing, 18(2):268-277 (doi: 10.1137/0218018)
Amotz Bar-noy has an Erdös number of 2
The following paper was co-authored by Amotz Bar-noy and Graham Kendall
- Moody D.L., Bar-noy A. and Kendall G. (2007) Construction of Initial Neighborhoods for a Course Scheduling Problem Using Tiling, IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Scheduling (SCIS '07), 187-191 (doi: 10.1109/SCIS.2007.367688)
Graham Kendall has an Erdös number of 3
If you are interested in finding out what your Erdös number is, I found two very good web sites:
- The Erdös Number Project at http://www.oakland.edu/enp/
- The Microsoft Academic Search at http://academic.research.microsoft.com/VisualExplorer#2019273&1112639