Erdös-Bacon = 7

And The Details Thereof


 

I'm one of those lucky individuals to have both a finite Erdös number (which means there is a chain of mathematical paper co-authorship that leads from me to Paul Erdös) and a finite Bacon number (which means there is a chain of appearances on film or TV that leads from me to Kevin Bacon).  As a result, I have a finite Erdös-Bacon number, which is defined as the sum of the two.

One's Erdös number can be found using the online MathSciNet Collaboration Distance Calculator, which automatically finds the shortest link using mathematical papers cited in Mathematical Reviews.  For me it reports the value 4, as shown below.

This first collaboration in the sequence is the paper Magic Carpets that I co-authored with Erich Friedman in 2000, whose subject is a broad generalization of the concept of magic squares.

The first step in my chain to Kevin Bacon is an appearance in 1976 with Floyd Vivino on The Uncle Floyd Show, a screenshot of which is shown below.

(I'm on the left, juggling two spheres and a bear, and Floyd is on the right playing the piano.)  From Floyd Vivino it's just two more steps to Kevin Bacon, as shown in the diagram below.

This demonstrates that my Bacon number is 3, giving an Erdös-Bacon number of 4 (Erdös) + 3 (Bacon) = 7.