Sunday, July 19, 2009

What is Your Erdös Number?


Paul Erdös was a Hungarian Jewish mathematician who published a very large number of papers with a total of 511 collaborators. Those collaborators are assigned an Erdös number of one. Those who collaborated with them but not with Erdös have an Erdös number of two and so forth. Economics Nobel Prize winner Eric Maskin has an Erdös number of two and as a result Partha Dasgupta and Kenneth Arrow have Erdös numbers of three. As I've published papers with people who published papers with Arrow and/or Dasgupta (Charles Perrings and Bob Costanza) my Erdös number is probably five.

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