research scientist
I was sort of surprised when I figured out that I have a finite Erdös number 1. (Fun fact: there are so many Ph.D.s at Google, there’s an intranet badge for that.) But I suppose it shouldn’t have been that surprising:
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paul Erdös | Pat O’Neil | Mike Stonebraker | me |
This was formerly:
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pat O’Neil | Jim Gray | Mike Stonebraker | ||
| Paul Erdös | Ron Graham | Tom Leighton | Eric Brewer | me |
| Maria Klawe | Steve Gribble | Eric Brewer |
until Mike Stonebraker published a paper with some better-connected people, putting him into this equivalence class of over 11,000 people. Now, to shorten this chain, it would be necessary for me to write a paper with someone in this set of 511 people…a set that is now, unfortunately, monotonically decreasing in size (as well as largely Hungarian to begin with).
For a while, I had a smaller Erdös number than Paul Dourish, who writes a seemingly infinite number of papers. Unfortunately, he figured out together that he had written papers with people who had actually written theory papers, as opposed to people who had written papers with people who had written papers with theory people; and then he figured out an even shorter path later.
Google Scholar, MS Academic, DBLP, arXiv/CoRR, ORCID.
Back when Berkeley CS moved out of Evans Hall, I noticed a discarded copy of my advisor’s dissertation in the hallway and used that to add an entry for him in the Mathematics Genealogy Project database. So you can trace a lineage from me (and a bunch of other random database systems researchers) back to 17th Century Germany.
(But I am a math poseur. My uncles Togo and Eizo are the real mathematicians in the family.)
My apologies to the Hungarians out there. I know this should be styled as ő instead of ö, but the double-acute o doesn’t seem to be present in the fonts used by this theme. ↩