5
Many mathematicians will be familiar with the Erdős number, a measure of "collaborative distance." Those outside of the math world might be more familiar with the Bacon number, from the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, measuring the number of co-appearances an actor is from Kevin Bacon. An Erdős number is pretty much the same thing but for writing papers with mathematician Paul Erdős.

While I am not quite a mathematician, being a student of Computer Science, I have the opportunity to associate with those skilled in Mathematics. I took it upon myself to determine if I had a finite Erdős number. It turns out I do.

According to the instructions at the Erdős Number Project, I used the AMS MathSciNet Collaboration Distance search to find the answer.

I have documented my findings below; the last three lines of the table were determined via MathSciNet, the first two by personal knowledge. I was pleased to find my number is so low and am proud to declare my finding.

  person coauthored with to write
5 Joey Hagedorn Narayan Desai Directing Change Using Bcfg2
4 Narayan Desai Ewing L. Lusk MPISH: A Parallel Shell for MPI Programs
3 Ewing L. Lusk John Mackintosh Howie Combinatorial results relating to products of idempotents in finite full transformation semigroups
2 John Mackintosh Howie John L. Selfridge A semigroup embedding problem and an arithmetical function
1 John L. Selfridge Paul Erdős Some problems on the prime factors of consecutive integers