I found out about Erdős Numbers from my alma mater faculty Arif Zaman, who has done some early work on random number generation. After seeing the list of famous paths to Erdős numbers I got curious about my own Erdős number (if it was not infinite). Let me explain Erdős numbers a little; Paul Erdős is the only person with an Erdos number 0 Anyone who has published a paper with Paul Erdős has Erdős 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 Erdős number is basically a measure of research collaborations taking Paul Erdős as the center. The Erdős Number project found that Fields Medalists and Nobel Prize winners have small Erdős numbers. In other words this shows that the research circles are smaller than what we imagine them to be e.g. Albert Einstein (Physics) has Erdős 2, John Nash (Economics) has Erdős 4, Stephen Hawking (Cosmology) has Erdős 4

The online collaborative distance search page was not so useful in calculating my Erdős number primarily because I am not a Mathematician or a Theoretical Computer Scientist. So I had to manually calculate my Erdős paths and find the limit on the Erdős number (I had to find manual paths to someone recognized by the Erdős 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 Erdős number):

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

So I can say that my Erdős number is 5? What it really means is that from my co-author index on DBLP Bibliography after 5 clicks you should be able to see Paul Erdös. Small world!