Erdős

February 10, 2025[1]

Wikipedia defines the Erdős Number number as follows:

[T]he "collaborative distance" between mathematician Paul Erdős and another person, as measured by authorship of mathematical papers. The same principle has been applied in other fields where a particular individual has collaborated with a large and broad number of peers.

en.wikpedia.org

Isn't that cool? My dad explained the concept to me over brunch when I was a kid. I thought it was cool. Yesterday, I decided to calculate mine. This appears to be the shortest path:

  1. Peihan Li, Vishnu Menon, et al., Challenges Faced By Large Language Models In Solving Multi-Agent Flocking. https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04752
  2. Yuwei Wu, Yuezhan Tao, Peihan Li, Guangyao Shi, Gaurav S. Sukhatme, et al., Hierarchical LLMs In-the-loop Optimization for Real-time Multi-Robot Target Tracking under Unknown Hazards. https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.12274
  3. Eric Heiden, Luigi Palmieri, Leonard Bruns, Kai O. Arras, Gaurav S. Sukhatme, Sven Koenig, Bench-MR: A Motion Planning Benchmark for Wheeled Mobile Robots. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9387068
  4. James P. Bailey, Alex Nash, Craig A. Tovey, Sven Koenig, Path-length analysis for grid-based path planning. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0004370221001119
  5. Neil J. Calkin, Paul Erdos[2], and Craig A. Tovey, New Ramsey Bounds from Cyclic Graphs of Prime Order. https://epubs.siam.org/doi/10.1137/S0895480196298378

This makes my Erdős number 5. Calculating this took some time, do you know how many people from India share my full legal name? If we've published together, your Erdős number is at most 6.

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