Talk:Erdős number

message: From the article: "...the average is less than 5, and almost everyone with a finite Erdős number has a number less than 8."  Of course, the average is not less than 5, since many people have an infinite Erdős number.  Among those with finite, what is the source for the average being less than 5?  Perhaps it should be median?  I am inclined to delete the sentence if there is not a source. (Cj67 21:11, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: CJ, some people mean "finite Erdos Number" when they say "Erdos Number". So the line can be made unambiguous by writing "...the average finite Erdos Number is less than 5...". Since I myself wouuld prefer that high-school students not consider infinity as a number (but as part of a process), I prefer to say "Spencer's Erdos Number is 1 and Pete does not have an Erdos Number" instead of "...Pete's EN is infinity". Some things called infinity, such as Aleph-Null and Omega, can indeed be considered as numbers in certain number fields, but that's an advanced topic and people studying those topics don't need to be warned about the ambiguity. Pete St.John (talk) 17:46, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Average of 5?

message: I'm sorry, but this just doesn't cut it:
:However, according to MathSciNet Carl Friedrich Gauss (born 1777) has Erdős numbers 4 as follows: Gauss – Hermann Minkowski – Albert Einstein – Ernst Gabor Straus – Erdős. The connection between Gauss and Minkowski is a collection of essays containing separate works of both authors.
Gauss died in 1855. Minkowski was born in 1864. So, there is no way they could in any real sense of "co-author" co-author anything. Having Gauss & Minkowski's works collected in the same volume does not count in any way as a collaboration between the two, but merely a decision of later editors..... So I will delete this bit. --SJK 11:14, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed.  McKay 13:08, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gauss-Minkowski - just ain't gonna work 

message: This article keeps using the term 'finite' to describe Erdős numbers. I think this is a bit ridiculous, even more so to say that if a person doesn't have a chain of co-authors linking them to Erdős that their Erdős number is infinite! What is the point in such language when it doesn't serve to convey a concise meaning? Far better to say in more concise and explanatory fashion that they either have an Erdős number or they don't. 
The article also talks at one stage about the earliest person to have a *positive* finite Erdős number. This is even more ridiculous since by definition there is no such thing as a negative Erdős number. I have to wonder about the motivation to embellish the language with such pointless words.
Kevin
: I agree with you about the "positive".  As for "infinite", the problem is that more than one definition of "Erdős number" is going around and both definitions are mixed up in the article.  In one version, some people have an Erdős number and some don't.  In the other version, everyone has an Erdős number but some of them are "infinite" (a phrase never defined precisely, but the whole thing is informal).  My recollection of the way combinatorialists talked about it when Erdős was still alive is that the second version was more popular.  It is also the definition used in the quasi-official Erdős number project . So I propose writing the whole article in that fashion, with a passing mention that some people prefer "not existing" over "infinite". McKay (Erdős number 1) 03:35, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Here "positive" must mean "non-zero". The earliest person to have a non-negative Erdos number is, by definition, Paul Erdos.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.96.105.72 (talk) 11:32, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

text: I argue that infinite Erdős numbers are almost mandatory. Suppose, arguendo, that instead we took the "you either have one or not" position. Then how could we tidily express the conditions under which people would have them? "You have an Erdős number if... umm... you are he, or a co-author, or a co-author of a co-author... umm... well, you have one provided... umm, provided you're one of the people who has one." Yes, of course one could define it by recourse to graph theoretic jargon (e.g., "You have one if you and Erdős are in the same component of that graph on the human species in which adjacency corresponds to having co-authored in the scientific literature") or to recursion (e.g., "Erdős does, as does every non-Erdős who's a co-author with anybody who does"), but yuck and yuck. How much simpler to say "Every human has an Erdős number." Now that is concise. And meaningful.—PaulTanenbaum (talk) 03:46, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Concise and meaningful language

message: Would someone who is familiar with IPA please add the pronunciation according to it? Most people aren't familiar with Hungarian and will mispronounce the name. -Emiellaiendiay 07:42, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Could someone please add a stress mark to the IPA? Is it ˈɛrdøːʃ or ɛrˈdøːʃ?  Stevvers 21:27, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Still missing after 7 months. Surely someone must know. And is there an anglicised equivalent (UK ˈɛədɜːʃ/US ˈɛrdɜːʃ, perhaps)? — 85.211.4.226 15:35, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I corrected it. In Hungarian the stress is always on the first syllable.A Hungarian --82.131.157.68 (talk) 12:38, 26 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Pronunciation

message: can someone explain why erdos was chosen, and why it is considered so important? I'm struggling to see how having a high Erdos number is in any way "good" or worthy of any note whatsoever. Same with the Kevin Bacon thing. May I suggest a football one for Liam Brady?
). Got a 61 in his course though (not due to lack of effort). - 212.247.170.12
* You should read about Paul Erdos; a fascinating man. He was highly idiosyncratic, very much respected as a genius in the field; and he travelled widely, meeting huge numbers of fellow mathematcians. That's why he was chosen. 
* A high Erdos Number isn't good. Low numbers are prestigious; 1 means you coauthored with the Great Man himself, 2 means you coauthored with someone 1, and so on. The lower your number, the closer you are (in this sense) to a group of very productive and regarded mathematicians. Of course you might also be close to them in other ways, and not have any number at all. Having a low number is like attending a prestigious school, it doesn't mean you are cool, it is just one piece of evidence. 
* Yes, the same thing is done with other personalities, e.g. appearing in a movie with Kevin Bacon. Pete St.John 19:50, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Erdos did a lot of work in Graph Theory generally; the Erdos-Spencer Probailistic Method is conspicuous but not particularly pertinent to Erdos Numbers. Erdos coauthored with a huge number of people (500 odd). If you consider the graph G with E set defined by (x,y) in E when x coauthors with y, then Erdos is the highest degree node in the largest connected component. That makes him a natural "root" node to designate. Pete St.John 19:14, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  And 0 means you are the Great Man himself and thus we now know that there is an afterlife! Teeheehee. --116.14.72.74 (talk) 11:17, 25 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  why? 

message: The Erdos Project lists Erdos as having 511 co-authors (i.e. people with a number of 1) but this article only lists 509. I don't know anything about this, but can somebody who does either explain that or fix it (would assume we'd need to fix the number of 2s,3s, but maybe thats in the project website again) Spurgistan 19:59, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: a great many of the papers involved were never in electronic form (unlike today, when almost any paper would be composed originally MSWord, at least, if not TeX or whatever). So cross-linking all the bibliographies is a huge manual job. Pete St.John 19:54, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  number of co-authors 

message: The category for Erdos Numbers, e.g. "Carliz (category persons with Erdos Number 2)" has been deleted. There have been several debates about this, but the most recent one led to deletion. It's actually a very interesting social phenomenon; I invite mathematicians with any concern for pedagogy and general public perceptions to look at some of the reasons given for the deletion.
The admin who deleted it has begun to compile some of the reasons given at a talk page, and I have added some rebuttals, but I can tell you it's frustrating. It just astonishes me that so many innumerate people would even care about Erdos Numbers. Pete St.John 19:41, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Being the editor who nominated these categories for deletion in this third instance, I'd like to comment that I personally do appreciate the pedagogy argument. I just thought that Wikipedia's present category scheme is unsuitable for this activity. A lot of useful connections could be categorized if we had a more flexible technical solution than at present. __meco 11:31, 3 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  The desirability of a better mechanism doesn't justify destroying the exisiting one. Please program a better one, or propose a better existing one, and then vote to switch to the better system, instead of just destroying the existing one. Pete St.John 17:41, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I think's a great pity that a few of the editors who wanted this category kept have not also retained their civility. Describing the delete !voters as "innumerate people" is a quite unnecessary personal attack. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:07, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  I don't mean to "attack" any individuals. I've described the group as "innumerate", yes, because the logic presented isn't coherent to me. As a whole, they seem to be non-mathematicians with no identifiable interest in the topic, and I have no clue, honestly, what they want. Pete St.John 17:41, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

text:  It may be taht there is a problem with using the category system for this. If there is I must admit that I do not understand what the problem is. It seems to me for example much better to use categories than lists due to the problem of maintenance. At the moment the Edos numbers are being deleted from pages which is a shame as people have put in the effort to calculate (at least an upper bound for) them.  When I added the Erdos number to a biography I placed an example of a sequence of authors giving taht number as a comment (sometimes in the text as a comment as wel as edit summary). This leads me to propose that for Mathematicians at least with Edos number up to 4 we make a template that will give an upper bound on the Erdos number with an example of a chai of the right length (surnames of authors will do) in small print. This way if some other mechanism becomes appropriate for forming lists or doing searches it can just be added to the template. How does taht sound? Billlion 17:01, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

text: The suggestion of an infobox has been made in the discussion on the CfD talk page. I would suggest that there is no reason to stop at 4 or 6 or any number. If a math bio article is about one of the five vertices with Erdos number 13 (supposedly the diameter of the graph at this time), or if the vertex is not connected to the Erdos component, that fact just as interesting, and worthy of mention in an infobox. I'm not realy sure that a chain is really necessary, except in cases where the standard automated tools at MathSciNet don't provide one, or where the standard tools give a number higher than the actual verifiable bound. --Ramsey2006 17:18, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Deletion of the Category 

message: Someone just deleted the statement ... As a result of this drift, the mean Erdős number of living people must increase over time... as unsourced and "illogical". The statement does not say monotone increasing; changing it to "must tend to increase..." would be an improvement. But a little simple logic (which this is) in common language should be OK for explaining what's going on, to laymen. In an article about prime numbers I would show why 3 is prime, not cite a specific reference for that particular piece of fact. So I would prefer improving the explication, to merely deleting it. Pete St.John 16:36, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Related to the section "Effect of Erdős' death on the Erdős number," it should be noted that a handful of people continue to get Erdős numbers of 1.  According to the Erdős Number Project, the latest was a paper in 2007. Sillcat (talk) 11:50, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Distribution over time 

message: Article is self-contradictory, viz:
"Effect of Erdős' death on the Erdős number
Given that Erdős died in 1996 and no works of his remain to be published, it is no longer possible for a person to be newly assigned an Erdős number of 1."; and
"eBay auctions
%< snip >%
This is noteworthy because with the exception of a few co-written articles to be published posthumously, 2 is the lowest number that can now be achieved."  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.89.169.22 (talk) 03:07, 26 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  One of these things is not like the other. 

message: On the Paul Erdős page regarding Erdős numbers, it says, "Because of his prolific output, friends created the Erdős number as a humorous tribute..." That is a gentle and succinct introduction to what is, in effect, an in-joke between mathematicians who knew of the man. In contrast, the Erdős number page drops no hint for the outsider that this number is not meant to be taken too seriously. I never met the man, but I doubt Paul Erdős would have encouraged it to be considered a true measure of collaboration even though he himself was a fine example of someone who spent his life in collaboration.
The idea of the Erdős number reminds me of the Mornington Crescent (game) which must never be explained lest the joke be lost, or that other pretend game, cricket, whose rules contain no rhyme nor reason (just joking about the cricket). Sadly, if the article is meant to enlighten, the joke needs to be revealed, unless the intention is to keep outsiders in the dark. Surely that isn't the point?
Could the opening paragraph be changed to include a reference to its humorous nature to prevent strangers to the subject from being mislead?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.187.233.172 (talk) 21:00, 16 September 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: You have a point - "created as a humorous tribute" is a great way to put it, too. Let's stick it in the lede and see what happens. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 22:16, 16 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gentle, humorous tribute to a great man, or profound measurement of collaboration? 

message: Given that von Neumann, Stanislaw Ulam, and Robert D. Richtmyer wrote the paper which defined the now commonplace method known by the name Monte Carlo (Statistical methods in neutron diffusion , Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory report LAMS–551, 1947), should not von Neumann be listed with an Erdös number of 2?  William R. Buckley (talk) 03:03, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  John von Neumann 

message: Why does the definition use the phrase 'mathematical paper' when everyone seems to ignore that?  (And, BTW, xkcd is so cool, that I cannot mention it without violating NPOV.)
Chippo1 (talk) 10:22, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, the MathSciNet distance calculator only considers mathematical papers (more specifically, papers within the MathSciNet database). —David Eppstein (talk) 15:36, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Paper-hood-heit 

message: Article doesn't clarify following case:
X and Y collaborate on paper, but don't have their Erdős numbers.
Later on, X collaborates with Z and gets Erdős number of n. Does Y get n+1 or do they still have infinity?
Can one's Erdős number decrease in time without them writing any papers, as people on their shortest path get smaller Erdős numbers?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.150.223.147 (talk) 15:12, 6 November 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, it is possible for the  Erdős number to decrease in this way. It does not depend on the order in which the papers on the path were written. —David Eppstein (talk) 15:22, 6 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Erdős numbers and time 

message: One editor added the following section to the article:
: "M.V. (Mikhail) Simkin suggests that number should be used to represent the distance between Boris Berezovsky and connecting scientists. See this ref.".
Another editor removed the section, with the wp:ES of "Berezovsky number has no scientific significance. The living persons mentioned in Simkin's paper might dislike the association.". 
Well, the cited repository arXiv.org looks to me to be a reasonable wp:RS. 
The paper is already in the public domain, and Wikipedia (WP) doesn't generally wp:censor existing external content. Why might living persons mentioned in Simkin's paper dislike the association? 
Even if 1 of them were to, it's still not WP's job to bow to their sensitivities, and WP has means for them to express their views & ban bad sources, if proven. 
Hence, I have reinstated the section concerned, for now, until any wp:consensus emerges on this page. As ever, other editors are cordially encouraged to have further say, below here. Trafford09 (talk) 13:51, 4 December 2011 (UTC)
replies: text:  The repository arxiv.org is the collection of preprints, mostly of good quality but also some junk. This work is not refereed as in peer-reviewed journals. Everybody can post there a paper on `Simkin number' for example. Simkin's paper is better suitable as a joke for university party, rather than for publication. In the paper Simkin mentions a number of highly respectable scholars as `accomplices', which might be disliked by the mathematical community. My suggestion is to remove the section completely for the reasons just given.ArthurTheKing (talk) 16:16, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

text: We don't need it. What we need to include it are reliable sources for its significance. Arxiv preprints are essentially self-published so, unless they are by a recognized expert in the subject area, they don't count as reliable. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:14, 4 December 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: It is more than elaborate, it is an unethical and bad joke. Apparently, Simkin aimed to attract attention to his person by means not accepted among scientists.  His article is offending and misleading. The last of 16 publications on MathSciNet Simkin refers to is dated 1989, even before the fall of the USSR, thus in which sense the people mentioned could be considered as `accomplices' is not clear at all. The content of Simkin's article is partly inaccurate: he  claims that "Berezovsky defenders argue that he is an honest mathematician with an Erdős number of 4". Who are these mysterious defenders (or opponents)? These are no more that Simkin's ill fantasy, as long as he is not able to present concrete "defenders that argue..." the claim is unsourced. Above that, the number introduced by Simkin has no scientific significance. Would you think Erdős were happy to see references to such dubious publications?ArthurTheKing (talk) 20:23, 4 December 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: But the arXiv article appeared in Significance (a magazine of the Royal Statistical Society) http://www.significancemagazine.org/details/webexclusive/1393253/Berezovsky-number.html . Must be significant enough.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.105.34.180 (talk) 23:05, 12 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Berezovsky number 

message: Impact is clearly a reasonable choice here.  For example, a Merriam-Webster dictionary definition includes (italics in the original):
2 : the force of impression of one thing on another : a significant or major effect <the impact of science on our society> <an environmental impact study>
and 4 of their 5 examples are non-physical impacts of this kind.
Also, in scholarly work it is common to rate the impact of articles, journals, and authors, even in a formal and scholarly context.  See for example this discussion on impact factors. LouScheffer (talk) 11:51, 31 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Impact vs effect 

message: I believe the name is Erdös NOT Erdős. If so it is misspelled thoughout the article. Also, the URL for this article does not work, perhaps because the character used in his name is not recognized.  This should be fixed.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.66.65.201 (talk) 23:53, 14 April 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: What's your source for this, all the sources I've checked spell it "Erdős". Paul August ☎ 00:18, 15 April 2014 (UTC)

text: Ask any Hungarian mathematician and you will get the same answer: Erdős.  There is really no question about it, even if you can find sources spelling it differently. The URL with this character is perfectly legal. Older browsers may fail to handle it properly, but relatively recent versions of all the common browsers should have no problem. McKay (talk) 01:57, 17 April 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Spelling

message: The Erdős Number is known (and the Bacon Number et al. based on it), but a more significant and prestigious number is the related Erdős Couch Number.  Mathematician Paul Erdős himself was the Zero.  Anyone who has sat on a couch with Erdős is a One.  Anyone other than Erdős, and not a One, who has sat on a couch with a One is a Two, and so on.  For example, the late logician and philosopher Willard van Orman Quine of Harvard University could claim to be at most a Two, because he once sat on a pew (which counts as a couch) next to me.   Erdős had once sat on a couch where I was sitting, in a lobby in Florida. (I didn't converse with either, but that doesn't affect the Number.)  Erdős Couch Numbers have been considered too exclusive to reveal on public websites, especially since riffraff might have an incentive to plop down beside one on a couch merely to obtain a better (lower) Number.  But, being known for your low Erdős Couch Number could help a shy male pick up chicks (something my Erdős Number never did).  Fritz Lehmann.24.55.4.38 (talk) 12:32, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Erdős Couch Number 

message: Another editor and I are having this agreement about Judge Richard Posner. I contend not, because a huge portion of the chattering classes probably has such a number, and if we list one, we are Wiki-ethically obligated to try to list as many as we can. Do the math! Bellagio99 (talk) 16:18, 21 November 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. Maybe it would be worth mentioning if we were talking about the president or the Pope or some incredibly well-known person like that, but otherwise I think that 3 is the limit. (Hey, that's a math joke! Limit - get it? ) - DavidWBrooks (talk) 16:35, 21 November 2014 (UTC)
replies: text:   In general an Erdos number of 4 is nothing to get excited about.  But if it shows that some seemingly unrelated field (such as law in this case) then it's significant since it expands the connected component of the Erdos graph significantly, which most other members of strength 4 do not.  So the importance here is that the number is finite, not that it's particularly low.   LouScheffer (talk) 05:16, 22 November 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Should a Notable Person's Erdos of 4 be highlighted 

message: The argument for including Posner is that he's a staple of legal scholarship.  This means, of course, that lots of other legal folks will have finite Erdos numbers (including, I strongly suspect, almost all the US Supreme Court Justices, and at least some of the US presidents who were academics at some point in their career).  This is the exactly what Castro and Grossman points out in Famous Trails to Paul Erdos.  In particular see table 2, noting that some of the famous folks in other fields are shown to have Erdos numbers of at most 7 or 8.   LouScheffer (talk) 05:12, 22 November 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: At least one Supreme Court justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, has a finite Erdos number, due to the chain AE Roth -> RA Posner -> L Epstein -> JL Spaeth -> AL Kalleberg ->BF Reskin -> DJ Merritt -> RB Ginsburg, giving Ginsburg a number of at most 10.  Each of these links can be found with Google Scholar.  Of course this is original research, so I did not include it in the article.   LouScheffer (talk) 04:31, 24 November 2014 (UTC)
replies: text:  Continuing this thread, at least one American president had a finite Erdos number.  The chain of jointly argued decisions might go RB Ginsburg -> W Rehnquist -> WO Douglas -> Harlan Stone -> William Howard Taft.  (all from the Case Law search of Google scholar).   LouScheffer (talk) 04:53, 24 November 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Include Posner? 

message: Isn't the link to Phys Author Rank Algorithm a spam? It is self referential and no source demostrates its relevance. Shouldn't the link be deleted? 78.15.171.134 (talk) 11:25, 7 August 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: That sentence and its references don't seem to have any substantial connection to Erdos numbers; I have removed it.  --JBL (talk) 15:34, 7 August 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  possible spam 

message: The article says: Collaboration distances will necessarily increase over long time scales. This is likely to be true (only in a special sense, see below), but not a necessary property of the graph. Suppose with a bit of exaggeration that there are presently hundreds of "isles" of mathematicians working in different fields, with no collaboration connecting the isles (this is a conceivable situation, though not the actual one). The isles might continue to be isolated for centuries; then just a few collaborations between authors belonging to different isles will immediately turn a great deal of infinities to finite numbers. 
What is true is that:
(1) Given mathematicians X and Y, ther collaboration distance cannot increase with time, but it might decrease.
(2) The Erdos number of some mathematician X in the far future cannot be smaller than (t-T+1)a where t is the time of the first publication of X, T the time of the last Erdos publication, and a is the largest possible publishing time of any mathematician (the difference between the time of the first and the last publication) (or some similar formula, I have not checked exactly full details).78.15.171.134 (talk) 11:46, 7 August 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Point (2) is surely what was intended; I have made the small wording change necessary.  --JBL (talk) 15:36, 7 August 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you all.78.15.171.134 (talk) 21:44, 7 August 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Collaboration distances over long time scales.  

message: Link see - 
http://graemesimsion.com/?page_id=2
Extract - 
"Nerd fact: My (Kevin) Bacon number is 4 – Self – Dominique Simsion (Voluntary Act) – Beth Child (Push Up) – Meryl Streep (Evil Angels) – Kevin Bacon (The River Wild)
My Erdos number is 4: Self – Daniel Moody – Amotz Bar-noy – Nathan Linial – Paul Erdos ….
… which gives me the (rare) Erdos-Bacon number of 8. Colin Firth and Natalie Portman have 6s. Partner also 8. Of course."
121.127.211.147 (talk) 08:47, 18 August 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: You need much better sourcing than your personal website. See WP:RS and WP:V. Sundayclose (talk) 13:30, 18 August 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Graeme Simison - author - Erdos number 4 - Erdos-Bacon number 8 

message: The last paragraph of the Overview section says 134,007 mathematicians have an Erdos number. So we must know the Erdos number of each of them. What is the largest Erdos number? This would fit well into that paragraph. Loraof (talk) 16:45, 17 August 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Largest Erdos number 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: The article claims that according to https://oakland.edu/enp/erdpaths/ Laplace is such a person with the EN=14.
But Laplace published an article in co-authorship with Antoine Lavoisier (which is used to calculate EN for Laplace), and Lavoisier was born in 1743, 6 years before Laplace.
:This has a good, reliable source, so I changed it.  One the other hand, Lavoisier was a chemist, so Laplace might still be the earliest mathematician.  But that's not what the sentence says.  LouScheffer (talk) 19:13, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Since Erdős number link into other fields, the oldest number might not belong to a mathematician.  For example, a link to the legal field is Roth->Posner.  But Posner is linked to Supreme Court justice Ginsberg, via AE Roth -> RA Posner -> L Epstein -> JL Spaeth -> AL Kalleberg ->BF Reskin -> DJ Merritt -> RB Ginsburg.  And once on the Supreme Court, there are lots of co-authored decisions, i.e RB Ginsburg -> W Rehnquist -> WO Douglas -> Harlan Stone -> Holmes -> Harlan -> Clifford -> Catron -> Story -> Washington -> Cushing, where Cushing (EN<=20) is the earliest-born Supreme Court Justice (born 1 March 1732).  All these links can be found in Google Scholar.  (As a written, co-authored publication on an unsettled question, it seems to me that Supreme Court (or any appeals court) decision should count.)  LouScheffer (talk) 15:39, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Some sources limit the definition of Erdős numbers only to publications on mathematical topics (widely construed), not to academic scholarship more generally. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:17, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Earliest person to have a finite Erdős number 

message: The site http://www.ams.org/mathscinet/collaborationDistance.html now requires a login. Does anybody know since when this is and if it is an error by the admins there?
--Ralf Muschall (talk) 14:07, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Don't know if it is an error. The site works from a university IP without a password, using the university's subscription - the same as most of MathSciNet. This could be accidental or an intentional change, of course. Could you see if this link works better for you? . Thanks, — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:19, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: As far as I know it has always required either a log in or an IP address from a subscribing institution. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:26, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

text: It works for me from my house with no login, if I use the link I posted above. The link that used to be in the article does not work, however. I think they must have moved the page on the AMS website, or consolidated the "free" version of the tools into one place, and our link was not updated to match. — Carl (CBM · talk) 21:29, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Collaboration distance site is password locked 

message: So, the Shusaku number entries in other pages refer to this page. That's fine. Except this page does not have any reference to Shusaku number. Shouldn't the Shusaku number and a link to Honinbo Shusaku's page be in the Variations section? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2607:fa49:283f:b400:d9f6:5dbe:e566:e79 (talk) 
:Are there any reliable sources about the Shusaku number?  When the article was deleted ten years ago, apparently there were none.  If there are some, then sure it should be added here.  If there are not, then the mentions in other articles are probably undue and should be removed there.  (I am mildly inclined to believe that the latter is the case.) --JBL (talk) 00:13, 27 July 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I just took a look at all articles that link to the redirect page Shusaku number: .  Among them, there is exactly one reference, this 2011 blog post at the website of the American Go Association (used at Small-world experiment).  It uses the phrase only in quotation marks and is clear that it is coining a neologism.  Also, it doesn't even make the case that this is a good analogy (the point of Erdős and Bacon is not that they're the best at what they did, it's that they were extremely prolific).  I will not take any action immediately, but unless someone finds a better source, I will at some point try to remember to remove the references to the concept from other articles. --JBL (talk) 00:21, 27 July 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Shusaku number 

message: @David Eppstein, re: the phrase "lived out of a suitcase"—per MOS:IDIOM, we should generally avoid idioms in favor of more direct phrases, even if the idioms are in common use. I couldn't really think of a better way to phrase it (hence why I put  for someone else to do it, lol), but I still think it's something that should be changed. DecafPotato (talk) 05:22, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: You are correct about the need to avoid idioms, especially since so many non-English-native-speakers use the English wikipedia. But I think "lived out of a suitcase" is sufficiently self-evident that it can stay, although that's an opinion of course. I don't think it needs to be replaced by something long like "had no home of his own but spent all his time staying in the homes of other mathematicians all over the world, living out of a suitcase". - DavidWBrooks (talk) 13:10, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: I reworded the sentence before seeing this comment. Best wishes, Pol098 (talk) 18:21, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  "lived out of a suitcase" 

message: A frivolous comment: playing around, I found an easy way to check your (or anyone's) Erdős number: using something which invokes a large language model chatbot, such as Google search, search for "erdos number" "homer simpson", where "homer simpson" is the name of someone you have coauthored with. I did this, and was astonished to find that my Erdős number is 5. Details of collaborations were listed, so it is possible to check - I didn't bother, and will just claim this number. However, when I repeated the search a couple of times I got different responses, without an Erdős number. Best wishes and happy hunting, Pol098 (talk) 18:18, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Check your own Erdős number