Whats your Mann number?

Posted by William M. Connolley on February 28, 2006
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John fleck has been having fun with degrees of separation. See Erdos, Lambert and Fleck and Eight Degrees of Separation (and the comments, where we discover that Steve McI has a “Mann number” of 4). Whats mine? I can do (C+Gregory) to (Gregory and Sexton) to (Parker and Sexton) to (Parker and Folland) to (Folland and M). So thats 4… there is probably a quicker way to get from Gregory for Mann, though.

Entertainingly, John sets the challenge of a chain connecting me with Lubos Motl. And if you’re wondering why you might want to do that, err, you haven’t been paying attention :-)

I’ll buy a beer (or a bier, since its in Wien) at EGU to the shortest chain… actually I’ll buy a bier for *any* commentor on this blog I meet at EGU.

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Comments

  1. #1 Robert P.
    2006/02/28

    This is scary. A single wrong turn on the path that leads me to Erdos brings me to M&M instead. (The critical node is a mathematician who published with Erdos and who also coauthored a paper with Essex.)

  2. #2 Steinn Sigurdsson
    2006/03/01

    You’re worried!
    Lubos has published with Dine, who has published with Farrar who has published with Hogg who has published with Blandford who has published with most of my co-authors.
    So my Motl number is no lower than 5, and possibly 4 if Banks or Dine has a more direct author link into the cosmology community.

    However, if you really want to be scared, I’ve written a paper with Rami Melhem, and he is likely to have a short path into the climate modeling community…

    My Erdoös number was reassuringly low, I think 4.

    Where do you find geo/climate author databases? Y’all have anything analogous to ADS or SPIRES?

    [Which Farrar and Dine? (see, I'm not in your community!). If it was Paul, I could probably get a link that way... Oh, and I use web-of-science; not sure what that is "really" -W]

  3. #3 Steinn Sigurdsson
    2006/03/01

    Erdös connectivity is interesting.
    Glashow has Erdös number 2, and he is a co-author with John Bahcall, who has a high connectivity within astronomy. So a lot of astronomers will have Erdös numbers of 4 or 5.

    Does Mann have a short path either to a comp sci type doing massive parallel simulations, or to some numerical algorithms person? The Mann numbers may be quite low across a broad community also.

    [Mann connects to Schmidt and Shindell (Shindell, D.T., G.A. Schmidt, M.E. Mann, D. Rind, and A. Waple. 2001. Solar forcing of regional climate change during the Maunder Minimum. Science 294:2149-2152.) and via Schmidt to any number of GCM running folk; there should be a 1-step from Schmidt to a compsci - W]

  4. #4 pierremenard
    2006/03/01

    Are you the same WM Connolley who co-authored

    “Howard, D.; Connolley, W. M.; Rollett, J. S.;
    Unsymmetric conjugate gradient methods and sparse direct methods in finite element flow simulation.
    Internat. J. Numer. Methods Fluids 10 (1990), no. 8, 925–945.”

    If so, mathscinet gives you a Motl number of 7.

    [Ha! Yes thats me, my very first paper. Who would have thought it would resurface in this fashion? Oh... and surely you mean, Gives Lubos a Connolley number of 7 ;-) - W]

  5. #5 pierremenard
    2006/03/02

    Here it is, if you are curious.

    Of course, that paper is the only one in the maths database, which allows automated searching of this kind. So it is likely a shorter path may exist from another paper. Nevertheless, cutting and pasting from an auto-generated mathscinet list:

    -W. M. Connolley coauthored with J. S. Rollett.

    - J. S. Rollett coauthored with S. Sivaloganathan.

    Sivaloganathan, S.; Rollett, J. S.
    A Newton/biconjugate gradient continuation procedure for buoyancy flows.
    Numerical approximation of partial differential equations (Madrid, 1985), 411–424,
    North-Holland Math. Stud., 133,
    North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1987.

    - S. Sivaloganathan coauthored with C. P. Katti

    Katti, C. P.; Sivaloganathan, S. On the stability of a classical second order method for solving a class of two-point boundary value problems. Appl. Math. Comput. 59 (1993), no. 2-3, 247–255.

    - C. P. Katti coauthored with Paul Nelson, Jr.

    Nelson, Paul(1-TXAM); Katti, C. P.; Neta, Beny
    Convergence of inner/outer source iterations with finite termination of the inner iterations.
    J. Integral Equations Appl. 2 (1990), no. 2, 147–174.

    -Paul Nelson, Jr. coauthored with Philip C.

    Nelson, P.; Victory, H. D., Jr.
    On the convergence of the multigroup approximations for submultiplying slab media.
    Math. Methods Appl. Sci. 4 (1982), no. 2, 206–229.

    -Philip C. Nelson coauthored with Andrew Glen

    Cohen, Andrew; Moore, Gregory; Nelson, Philip; Polchinski, Joseph; Semi-off-shell string amplitudes. Nuclear Phys. B 281 (1987), no. 1-2, 127–144. 81E99 (81E30 81G25)

    - Andrew Glen Cohen coauthored with Lubo\v s Motl

    Arkani-Hamed, Nima; Cohen, Andrew Glen; Karch, Andreas; Motl, Lubo\v s; Kaplan, David B.
    Deconstructing $(2,0)$ and little string theories.
    J. High Energy Phys. 2003, no. 1, 083, 13 pp.

  6. #6 Lubos Motl
    2006/03/04

    It would be truly impressive but the chain has a weak link. The hypothetical Nelson-Nelson paper only has one Nelson on it… ;-)

    http://motls.blogspot.com/

  7. #7 Lubo? Motl
    2006/03/05

    I found a fix of the Nelson-Nelson bug, giving you a Motl number equal to eight, see my blog. Best, LM