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A Dangerous Toy

8 October 2004

Do you know what your Erdös number is? Finding out a very accurate upper bound on your Erdös number, and many others, is now as easy as "abc", provided your institution has a subscription to MathSci. In fact, MathSci now offers the possibility of computing the collaboration distance between any two researchers, based on their extensive data base of papers.

Using this service, I have found two new paths justifying my Erdös number of four, discovered that my Donald Knuth number is also four, that my Andrew Wiles number is six, and that my John Horton Conway number is five. Suprisingly, I also "boast" a Turing number (seven), a John von Neumann number (five) and an Alonzo Church number (six). I am also connected to Godfrey Harold Hardy and John Edensor Littlewood by paths of length five.

As you can see, this is a very dangerous toy!