Big Jimmy's Erdos Number: 5

Paul Erdos (pronounced "AIR-dish") was a prolific mathematician who published some 1500 papers with collaborators all over the world. It is the part of the culture of mathematics to calculate your "Erdos Number", which is the number of degrees of separation you are from Erdos through co-authoring papers.

Turns out I have an Erdos number of 5, through:

Paul Erdos (0): David Avis (1): David Rappaport (2): Henk Meijer (3): Janice Glasgow (4): Jim Davies (5)

Through the following publications:

Glasgow, J., Kuo, T. & Davies, J. (2006). Protein structure from contact maps: A case-based reasoning approach. Information Science Frontiers, Special Issue On Knowledge Discovery In High-Throughput Biological Domains. 8: 29--36

Glasgow, J.I., Jenkins, M.A., McCrosky, C. and Meijer H., ``Expressing Parallel Algorithms in Nial", Parallel Computing, Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 331-347, 1989.

J. M. Diaz-Banez, F. Hurtado, H. Meijer, D. Rappaport, T. Sellares, The Largest Empty Annulus Problem, International Journal of Computational Geometry and Applications, Vol. 13, No. 4, August 2003.

D. Avis and D. Rappaport. Computing monotone simple circuits in the plane. In G. T. Toussaint, editor, Computational Morphology, pages 13-23. North-Holland, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1988.

D. Avis, P. Erdos, and J. Pach, "Distinct Distances Determined by a Subset of Points in Space," Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications, Vol. 1, pp. 1-12 (1991).

I'm currenly reading a neat book about him called My Mind Is Open.