Chris Potts has put up a chart of Erdös Numbers for Umass Linguists in the weekly What’s Happening in South College (WHISC) newsletter. Looking at the chart, I just realized that I have a finite Erdös Number: it is 8! The path goes from Paul Erdös to Ivan Niven to Samuel Eilenberg to Marcel-Paul Schützenberger to Noam Chomsky to Morris Halle to David Embick to Sabine Iatridou and then to me. To substantiate this claim, here is a hastily assembled bibliography:
- Paul Erdös and Ivan Niven.1946. “Some properties of partial sums of the harmonic series”. Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 52, 248–251.
- Samuel Eilenberg and Ivan Niven. 1944. “The ‘fundamental theorem of algebra’ for quaternions”. Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 50, 246–248.
- Samuel Eilenberg and Marcel-Paul Schützenberger. 1969. “Rational sets in commutative monoids”. Journal of Algebra 13, 173–191.
- Noam Chomsky and Marcel Paul Schützenberger. 1963. “The algebraic theory of context free languages” in Computer Programming and Formal Languages, P. Braffort, D. Hirschberg ed. North-Holland, Amsterdam, pages 118–161.
- Noam Chomsky, Morris Halle, and Fred Lukoff. 1956. “On Accent and Juncture in English.” In For Roman Jakobson. Mouton.
- David Embick and Morris Halle. 2003. Explorations in the Latin Conjugation. Mouton de Gruyter.
- Sabine Iatridou and David Embick. 1997. “Apropos pro“. Language 73(1), 58–78.
- Kai von Fintel and Sabine Iatridou. 2003. “Epistemic Containment”. Linguistic Inquiry 34(2), 173–198.
According to the trivia page of the Erdös Number Project, “the distribution of Erdös numbers is such that almost every mathematician with a finite Erdös number has a number of less than 8 — only about 2% are higher, and none is more than 15.” So, my number 8 is less than impressive, but at least I am connected to the graph. Then again, as John McCarthy pointed out to Chris Potts, according to the Extended Erdös Number Project, there is a horse with an Erdös Number of 3.
Kai,
You can chop your Erdös number down by one, since mine is 4 (and we are connected by a path of length 3):
Kai von Fintel
Sabine Iatridou
Anthony Kroch
Robert Frank
Giorgio Satta
Alberto Apostolico
Aviezri S. Fraenkel
Paul Erdös
Of course, that\’s not as good as that horse McCarthy mentions…
Bob
January 14th, 2004, at 10:35 am #Bob, you made my day. — Kai.
January 14th, 2004, at 10:40 am #