Erdős

 A mathematical friend of mine said to me yesterday that he wants to publish a paper with his supervisor and thus get an Erdős number of 4. This is an entirely new concept to me, but cool enough that I immediately added it to my list of fascinating trivia to talk about at length. I also didn't know that Hungarian has long umlauts, so I'm learning so much all at once, I fear my brain won't be able to handle it all.

An Erdős number measures the distance in terms of collaborating on mathematical papers with noted mathematician Paul Erdős, or collaborating with people who collaborated with him, and so forth. As I said last night, it's like that thing with degrees of Kevin Bacon*, only much cooler in an intellectual geeky way.

*Actually, last night I said 'Kevin Spacey', because you know what I'm like with names. I do apologise to whichever one of those actors is offended by being mistaken for the other.

I'm going to Cambridge tonight for the British Othello Championship over the weekend - I notice that Imre's Erdős number is 2, so quite possibly this is the key to being really good at othello! Does anyone want to co-author a paper with me? Only people with Erdős number of 1 need apply.