out of the blue » xkcd http://blog.azureabstraction.com Mon, 30 Apr 2012 02:37:31 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.39 Symmetric Graph http://blog.azureabstraction.com/465/symmetric-graph/ http://blog.azureabstraction.com/465/symmetric-graph/#comments Mon, 31 Mar 2008 12:18:19 +0000 http://blog.azureabstraction.com/?p=465 xkcd is great today, but most of you probably won't understand. I wouldn't either, except my combinatorics teacher last year told us stories about Paul Erdos. (Look at the hover text on the comic image.)

Paul Erdos was a mathematician famous for being prolific. He wrote (according to Wikipedia) over 1,500 articles with 511 individual collaborators. If you wrote a paper with him, you have an Erdos number of 1. If you wrote a paper with someone who wrote a paper with him, you have an Erdos number of 2.

This just in: Tom Lehrer and Noam Chomsky have the same Erdos number. (Here is a tool for calculating Erdos numbers; it is not exhaustive.)

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