Oh, they’re never going to get this through peer review in time. Although I guess they’ll upload it to ArXiv.
Legend has it that many people who published in other disciplines can also be linked to Erdős, but it’s very hard to figure out. At least you can use the Oracle to find out the Bacon number between actors. There should be a single database of all authors on scholarly papers. Pubmed can be mined, but that’s only life sciences and their closest friends.
There is a project for Erdős numbers. Tom Lehrer has an Erdős number of 4, the same as me.
Wooo!
But this is waaaaaaaaaaaaay more work than this (I personally know people with Bacon numbers of 3, which would make me have 4 if I just quickly record a video of us, right?)
I used this, and stuck my most likely link in there. It even has its own Erdos button!
There should be a single database of all authors on scholarly papers. Pubmed can be mined, but that’s only life sciences and their closest friends.
BiomedExperts is pretty good at connecting scientists via coauthership in scientific papers in the life sciences. It takes only a minute to figure out that our number would be 5:
Martin Fenner – H Phillip Koeffler – Chaim M Roifman – Sergio Grinstein – Daniela Rotin – Eva Amsen
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking of with the PubMed mining. But BME only uses papers when one of the authors on it has signed up. I tried to find an author who I know has a PubMed entry but no inclination to sign up for BME, and didn’t find them in their database.
It’s good to know I have a Fenner number of less than 6 =)
I have another cool degrees-of-separation story. I’ll tell it later (over beer, in London, hopefully) but the short version is: I’m 3 degrees from David Bowie by the criterion of playing in concerts with other musicians.
I see. That’s why I couldn’t find my connection to Bob O’Hara. But I would guess you could find this connection over not more than 6 steps between a lot of people that ever had a paper appear in PubMed.
Bert Vogelstein is of the most highly cited scientists in my field of cancer research, and there are more than 25.000 scientists with a Vogelstein number of 2.
This reminded me of something similar in pharmacology I vaguely recalled. Eventually located it as the Abel number. This number derives from mentoring relationships rather than collaborative ones.
In the course of searching for Abel I found a blog post with other things mentioned including some useful tools like Scilink and Neurotree