Back to the index. Or to the chambers
This article has 10 links. View as Cloud or List.
| 1 | Polygon |
| 1 | Metric Space |
| 1 | Relation Theory |
| 1 | Number |
| 1 | Graph |
| 1 | Group |
| 2 | Connected Space |
| 2 | Axiom Of Infinity |
| 4 | Sphere Metric Space |
| 7 | John Horton Conway |
Loading ...
Planetmath Browser (2008—2009)
BSD licence | A django site
All articles taken from PlanetMath.org snapshot under CC-BY-SA licence.
→ The original article on PlanetMath.org
Other Formats: LaTeX
Erd Hos Number
The shortest number of collaborations with other mathematicians through which a particular mathematician can be connected to Paul Erdős is the Erdős number of that mathematician. For example, N. J. A. Sloane coauthored Sphere Packings, Lattices and Groups with John Horton Conway. In turn, Conway coauthored a paper with Erdős in 1979, thus Sloane's Erdős number is 2. Since Erdős died in 1996, 2 is the lowest Erdős number a mathematician working today can achieve.
One way to visualize the Erdős number is by drawing up a collaboration graph
whose vertex
set consists of all persons, where two vertices 
and 
are connected by an edge
if and only if 
and 
have a joint publication. Then the Erdős number of a person 
is the distance
in 
(possibly infinity) of 
from Erdős.