Your Erdos number is the "collaborative distance" between you and the prolific Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos measured via academic coauthorship. Your Bacon number is the collaborative distance between you and actor Kevin Bacon measured via roles in films. Your Erdos-Bacon number is the sum of the two. Lower numbers are cooler.
Using a combination of creative rule interpretation and wishful thinking, a case can be made that my Erdos-Bacon number is 8. This is pretty cool.
Details below.
This claim is not entirely unreasonable. My collaborative distance to Paul Erdos as calculated by CSAuthors.net is 4: (csauthors.net link)
The chain of papers is as follows (only coauthors relevant to the chain are listed):
The validity of this claim is subject to dispute because of fuzziness in what kind of papers qualify for Erdos collaborative distance. Everyone agrees they need to be peer-reviewed research papers published in academic journals. However, some sources opine a limitation to "mathematical papers". For example, Wolfram's MathWorld seems not to care about the nature of the papers: "The Erdős number is the number of "hops" needed to connect the author of a paper with the prolific late mathematician Paul Erdős." Wikipedia's opinion seems to vary within their article: stating in their opening paragraph "... measured by authorship of mathematical papers" but later stating "To be assigned an Erdős number, someone must be a coauthor of a research paper with another person who has a finite Erdős number", a statement not limited by paper content. Perhaps a reason for the ambiguity is the all of Erdos' papers were mathematical, but the domain of inquiry of his coauthors (and their coauthors) is broader.
The American Mathematical Society has a collaborative distance calculator limited to papers in certain mathematical journals. I do not appear there, but several of my coauthors do. Herb Sauro is there given an Erdos number of 3 and Howard Chizeck a number of 4. My papers with Herb were computer science, but my paper with Howard was on mathematical modeling which might be arguably more "mathematical".
Chizeck HJ, Butterworth E, and Bassingthwaighte JB. Error detection and unit conversion. Automated unit balancing in modeling interface systems. IEEE Eng Med Biol 28:3 50-58, 2009.
If one restricts Erdos collaboration distance to "mathematical" papers, one could make a case that my Erdos number is 5 rather than 4 (since Howard's number is 4).
This claim is not entirely reasonable. In 1988, I appeared as an extra in "Tippiecanoe", a film school project of aspiring actor/director Jeff McCord. One Jeff McCord appeared in the "The Scottish Play" in 2017 with Angela DiMarco, whose Bacon number is 2. Assuming these links hold up, this gives me a Bacon number of 4. The chain of films is as follows (only collaborators relevant to the chain are listed):
One weakness of this claim is whether a film-school project really counts as a "film". I mean, it was a complete, edited film with a script and actors and props and technical staff and credits and everything - shot on celluloid, no less! And you can actually watch it (at my house, anyway). OTOH, it was certainly not a commercial film, and is not listed in IMDb.
Another weakness is that I'm not sure the Jeff McCord I worked with in 1988 is the same Jeff McCord that worked on "The Scottish Play" in 2017. I suppose I could investigate this, but I'm probably happier not knowing.
A further weakness is that "The Scottish Play" is listed in IMBd as a television series, rather than a film. The Oracle of Bacon does not seem to recognize this "film", although it mentions the possiblity of their database being incomplete. My feeling is that in the domain of "collaborative distance" the distinction between films and television should not be relevant.
The IMDb credits page for "The Scottish Play" list Jeff McCord as "video director", rather than an actor. The Oracle of Bacon allows collaborative search to include directors (although the default search is just actors), so that's probably okay.
Under the most favorable interpretation of the above, my Erdos-Bacon number is 8 (*), which is quite low. For example, Wikipedia (as of Jan 2020) lists only 22 people with numbers 7 or below.
(*) 4 + 4 = 8 (Paul Erdos, personal communication, 1974).
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