I am a Dragon. I emerge from my Egg. 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
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.)
Posted by: Robert P. | February 28, 2006 11:28 PM
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]
Posted by: Steinn Sigurdsson | March 1, 2006 3:32 PM
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]
Posted by: Steinn Sigurdsson | March 1, 2006 3:47 PM
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]
Posted by: pierremenard | March 1, 2006 10:57 PM
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.
Posted by: pierremenard | March 2, 2006 7:26 AM
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/
Posted by: Lubos Motl | March 4, 2006 9:26 PM
I found a fix of the Nelson-Nelson bug, giving you a Motl number equal to eight, see my blog. Best, LM
Posted by: Lubo? Motl | March 5, 2006 12:03 AM