Erdos

If you are a Mathematics or CS person, you probably would have heard about The Erdös Number Project. Now, there are (were) few guys like Erdos (pronounced: AIR-dosh). The guy had more than 700 papers written, had no permanent home or job, and most of all: he was not a theorist, he solved problems, and not just solve them, but elegantly solve them. Combinatronics, Graph theory and Number theory were his favorite areas.

The Erdos number project would seem a little presumptous to the casual reader, but mathematicians and computer scientists are proud to have some kind of association with the great man himself. This is how the Erdos number project works:

1. You cannot have an Erdos number of 0, since it belongs to Erdos himself!.
2. If you published with Erdos, then your number is 1. There are more than 500 people who did that!
3. If you are a co-author of any of the persons with Erdos 1, then you have Erdos 2 (around 7000 people have it), and so on.

A professor in my Grad school has an Erdos number of 3. Unfortunately, his area is Distributed OS, of which I have no clue. So my Erdos number is infinity. :-(. Added later: Through the wonders of network theory, I found that my Erdos number is a modest 6 (or lesser). yahoo!!

This page dares us CS and Math guys (who have published) to compute our Erdos Number. If anyone is successful in finding out, share it with us.

Another fun link about the project is here.

A digressing thought: Why can't geniuses be normal?, and no smart-aleck comments saying "Hey, I am normal, and a genius"!.