I found out about Erdos Numbers from my alma mater faculty Arif Zaman - the father of Random Number Generation or Rand() function in programming languages. After seeing the list of famous people with finite Erdos numbers I got curious about my own Erdos number (if it was not infinite). Let me explain Erdos numbers a little; Paul Erdős is the only person with an Erdos number 0 Anyone who has published a paper with Paul Erdős has Erdos number 1 So, Arif Zaman has an Erdos number 4 because he published a paper with George Marsaglia who published a paper with George P. H. Styan who published a paper with Paul Erdős. The Erdos number is basically a measure of research collaborations taking Paul Erdős as the center. The Erdos Number project found that all winners of the prestigious Mathematics Awards (e.g. the Fields Medal) have finite Erdos numbers and also most Nobel laureates have finite Erdos numbers as well. In other words this shows that the research circles are smaller than what we imagine them to be e.g. Albert Einstein (Physics) has Erdos 2, John Nash (Economics) has Erdos 4, Stephen Hawking (Cosmology) has Erdos 4

The online collaborative distance search page was not so useful in calculating my Erdos number primarily because I am not a Mathematician or a Theoretical Computer Scientist. So I had to manually calculate my Erdos paths and find the limit on the Erdos number (I had to find manual paths to someone recognized by the Erdos project database and reduce the overall path length as much as possible). Here are some paths I found (listing only one example path for each Erdos number):

• Erdos 7 Path: Muneeb Ali ------ Joseph Polastre ------ David Culler [Culler, David E. is recognized as Erdos 5]
• Erdos 6 Path: Muneeb Ali ------ Koen Langendoen ------ Frans Kaashoek [Kaashoek, M. Frans is recognized as Erdos 4]
• Erdos 5 Path: Muneeb Ali ------ Kay Römer ------ Friedemann Mattern [Mattern, Friedemann is recognized as Erdos 3]

So my Erdos number is 5, which means that from my co-author index on the DBLP Bibliography Server after 5 clicks you should be able to see Paul Erdös. Small world!