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If you are one of the lucky mathematicians (there are 509 of
them) who has written a paper with Paul Erdös, then your
Erdös number is 1. If you wrote a paper with a colleague whose
Erdös number is 1, then your Erdös number will be 2.
And so on.
My Erdös number is 2, because in 1994 I wrote a paper (see here: Complexity analysis of wavelet signal decomposition and reconstruction) with Professor Charles Chui whose Erdös number is 1. In 1978, Charles Chui wrote a paper with Paul Erdös (see here: On changes of signs in infinite series). Erdös number of 2 is the largest it can be for anyone from now on, since Paul Erdös passed away in September 20, 1996. The Wikipedia page about Erdös number is here while the Wikipedia page about Paul Erdös is here. The Erdös Number Project studies research collaboration among mathematicians. To find out more about it and possibly discover your own Erdös Number, please go to here. Also, the social graph of Erdös is found here. For a while, I thought my Erdös number is 3 since I wrote several papers with Ömer Eğecioğlu who wrote several papers with Charles Ryavec who wrote a paper with Paul Erdös (see here: A characterization of finitely monotonic additive functions). Thanks to my UCSB students Emilie Menard Barnard and Keith Avery for pointing out my paper with Professor Charles Chui of Texas A&M, who was one of the nicest persons I have ever met. He is now retired. Çetin Kaya Koç |