"Steve Bennett" wrote
On 11/30/06, charles.r.matthews(a)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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