Comments on: Say Hello to Eszter

By: mitch

mitch — Fri, 26 Sep 2003 11:26:18 +0000

My one publication is in biophysics and gives me an Erdos number of (at most) five. But after re-reading WRITE.THESIS.FAST, I’ve realized that I was thinking way too small. There’s room for a whole new discipline here. I can see it now: “Reflexive Interdisciplinary Studies” … simultaneously a manifesto and a case study. And it would be set apart from all those other sciences that study themselves by its unique combination of sociological rigor, mathematical depth, and pure self-referentiality (no prizes for guessing our respective contributions). It’s the future of science, I tell you!

By: J. Ellenberg

J. Ellenberg — Thu, 25 Sep 2003 16:03:48 +0000

Mitch, if you write papers on networks you probably already do have a small Erdos number… I guess the real question is, if the paper writes itself, does that attach an Erdos number to the paper or to the null author?

By: Shai

Shai — Thu, 25 Sep 2003 11:37:18 +0000

Chris, see this page “Our criterion for inclusion of an edge between vertices u and v is some mathematical collaboration between them resulting in a published work. Any number of additional co-authors is permitted.”

By: Doug

Doug — Thu, 25 Sep 2003 10:42:05 +0000

Szia Eszter!!

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 25 Sep 2003 10:18:15 +0000

Hi Eszter – welcome on board! BTW, what does it take to have an Erdös number of three? I take it that means taught by someone who was taught by someone who was taught by Erdös. (Since if mere meeting is allowed I have a Stalin number of 3 by 4 possible routes – not that that’s anything to be proud of!)

By: Barry Scritchfield

Barry Scritchfield — Thu, 25 Sep 2003 09:20:16 +0000

Wow, this is a lot of neato information. Have any Don Luskin types called you for a job in the private sector?

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Thu, 25 Sep 2003 07:54:09 +0000

“Structurally equivalent” are we? Next thing we know, you’ll be blockmodelling us all into some collective categorical oblivion of groupthink… Yeah, that’s what Chris and Daniel said, too.

By: mitch

mitch — Thu, 25 Sep 2003 06:40:23 +0000

I want a small Erdös number too! Eszter? Jordan? Do you want to do a paper on network status and academic collaboration? It would pretty much write itself.

By: Henry

Henry — Thu, 25 Sep 2003 05:04:17 +0000

“Structurally equivalent” are we? Next thing we know, you’ll be blockmodelling us all into some collective categorical oblivion of groupthink…

By: xhenxhefil

xhenxhefil — Thu, 25 Sep 2003 04:53:46 +0000

Sorry, I wrote that before the similar post by an actual Hungarian person.

By: Xhenxhefil

Xhenxhefil — Thu, 25 Sep 2003 04:52:11 +0000

It’s neither. The o in Erdos either has two vertical lines or two acute accents. ő At this website it’s listed as “LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH DOUBLE ACUTE”. It’s like an ö but longer. In Hungarian adding an acute accent to a vowel makes it longer; in order to add an acute accent to a vowel with an umlaut, you have to turn the two dots into two acute accents. Added complication: most people when writing Hungarian make the accent a vertical line, since the acute is the only accent they have; there’s no need to tell it from a grave or a horizontal line. I think the only languages that use õ are Portuguese and Estonian.

By: eszter

eszter — Thu, 25 Sep 2003 04:46:45 +0000

Thanks for the kind welcome and comments! HTML and ASCII do not support the letter in Erdõs’s actual name. It is like an umlaut (the two dots) but instead of dots, they’re supposed to be two accent marks. Because the two dots (umlaut) on an o make an actual Hungarian letter whereas the tilde on the o does not, I think Hungarians sometimes opt to use the latter because the former (dots only) makes it seem as though it had been misspelled. To add an interesting little twist, it’s possible that Paul Erdõs and I are related, as in real life. His mother’s maiden name was Wilhelm and the family was from Slovakia. My father’s original last name was Wilhelm, also a Hungarian Jewish family from Slovakia. Very few Jews had this last name in general and they were both from the same area so it’s not a crazy idea. Of course, since so many members of both families died in the war and so much of the belongings were lost as well, these things are extremely hard to track down for sure.

By: J. Ellenberg

J. Ellenberg — Thu, 25 Sep 2003 02:50:34 +0000

Eszter and I have the same Erdos number!

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Thu, 25 Sep 2003 02:48:15 +0000

You mean you don’t know Pablo Erdõs, the great Spanish mathematician? I read about him in a Borges story once. I think it is Erdös.

By: Brian Weatherson

Brian Weatherson — Thu, 25 Sep 2003 02:45:12 +0000

That is an impressive number of publications. I’ve known philosophers to be made full professors on the basis of (considerably) fewer than that. But isn’t it Erdös rather than Erdõs? (I guess there’s a difference, but honestly I wouldn’t know what it is.)