Lee Katz

I am a bioinformatician at CDC. In my free time, I try to be a good husband and parent, and in my imaginary free time, I podcast with my co-hosts on the Micro Binfie podcast. All opinions are my own and are not necessarily shared by my employer.

1 minute read

Some friends were joking around online about their Kevin Bacon number. “I bumped into an actor one time who worked with Kevin Bacon.” “I went to high school with someone who had small parts and who worked with someone else who worked with Kevin Bacon.” Etc.

But it made me remember that I have an Erdos number! Briefly, there was a mathematician who had a very verbose output: over 500 publications. Any of his coauthors has a direct link to him and therefore an Erdos number of 1. He himself has an Erdos number of 0.

With the number of publications in the world right now, it is difficult to calculate an Erdos number and so people basically just have to do their best to calculate it. The person with the lowest number that I know in my field is Steven Salzberg who has a number of 3. The path is

  • Erdos -> Ruth Silverman
  • Silverman -> David M. Mount
  • Mount -> Steven L. Salzberg

Xiangyu Deng has published with Salzberg, and I have published with him, and so this gives me at most an Erdos number of 5.

  1. Erdos -> Ruth Silverman
  2. Silverman -> David M. Mount
  3. Mount -> Steven L. Salzberg
  4. Salzberg -> Deng
  5. Deng -> Katz

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