My Erdös Number is e

-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Szeliga
To: Tom Shepard
Subject: Re: Erdös Number?


> The other thing last year that brought you to mind
> was my reading "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers" by
> Paul Hoffman.
>
> I've forgotten what your Erdös number is. Refresh
> my memory: for someone who has written a paper with
> Erdös, is their number = 1?
>
> --
> Tom Shepard


My major professor's number was 1.
That's Tom Trotter's quote that opens the book.

Tom Trotter told me what to write my thesis on then
went to Hungary for the summer to work with Erdös (the o: is an umlaut)
and Egedvary. When he returned, he skimmed thru it,
made a few suggestions and signed it.


I never actually wrote a paper with Trotter that was
published in a refereed math journal, which has
become the criterion. If so, my number would
be Two. Laurie McIlveen did, but she was 'little miss perfect',
with her cute face and her cute southern accent and her undisputed
Erdös number of Two.

I have a "kinda sorta, related-by-marriage, once-removed"
Erdös number fudge-factor, which I have arbitrarily set at .71828183,
so added to the Two I would have had had I actually done any original
math while at Carolina (instead of hanging out at von Henmon's
punk club afterhours playing Risk & listening to Ska + REM),
this gives a tidy result of 2.71828183... or e, the base of the
natural logarithm.

There is a precedent. When Graham, P____, Erdös, C____ and
Kleitmann collaborated on articles, they'd sign them
"G Peck of Hollywood". Another Bourbaki-style math syndicate.
(I can't remember them all -- Ron Graham from Bell Labs I met
and Dan Kleitmann went to high school with Bill Krauss' mother
in Newark [Phillip Roth was in that class, too]; C is probably
Fan Chung, Graham's wife, but I think the acronym came before
they met. P might be Parker, but I'm not sure).

Doug West went to my high school, hung out a bit with my
older brother and Richard White (the only WHS student to wear
an Iggy Stooge dog collar). Doug's sister Karen sat next to me in
Plane Geometry (She was also some kind of bored genius.
Rumor has it she joined the Foreign Service.)

Anyway Doug went on to Princeton, to Fine Hall. Same building as the
Institute for Advanced Studies, but shared with the Math Dept, as I
found when passing thru with Lane Hankinson, my Carolina gf with
the yellow VW bug. We bumped around the building peeking thru
the Einstein end, when Doug was in the Math section. Didn't see
him but had a nice afternoon in Princeton, except for closing the
door of the post office on her finger.

Doug was rookie of the year, running with the fast crowd.
They gave G Peck a middle initial, but thought it diminished the
"Gregory Peck" connection, so the name was modified to
"G W Peck, University of Xanadu". Richard White took a degree in
Philosophy and Logic at Carlisle (Krauss and I hitched out to visit
him) then went to work for IBM.

Anyway, what does this story have to do with my alleged
self-assigned Erdos number of e?

Well, Doug West came out to Carolina, when Trotter got a
chunk of money designed to beef up specific components of
the Math Department. We recruited the hell out of Doug,
to no avail. We wound up buying some discounted Hungarians:
a bunch of Recursive Function Theorists and three Approximation
Theorists (including the ancient GG Lorenz), Peter Nyikos? (Set
Theory). The Computer Science dept split off in protest.

Okay, while we were at the Downstairs Plaza beerhall
Doug teased me mercilessly, trying to get me to guess
GW Peck's Erdös number. I was muy drunkado, in way
over my head, with no clear idea who GW PECK was,
let alone what his number was.
The teasing went on much longer then it should have.

Anyway, GW Peck's Erdös Number is i, as I had to have
explained to me in embarassing detail. 'Square root of minus 1,
imaginary number, IMAGINARY!!! an imaginary number'
That was pretty much the end of the vision of myself as a
'research mathematician'. It was replaced with 'novelist',
which also never came to pass.
I'm not sure what I want to be when I grow up now.

I never had contact with any of those guys after college.
In Vonnegut terms, were they my 'karass' or a 'false karass'?
Beats me.

So, I'm like Woody Allen's 'Zelig', repeatedly posing with
the great, who have no idea who this guy in the picture with
them is. Hence, since I'm telling the story, I have assigned
myself the Erdös number of e.
_______________________________________________
Tim Szeliga
'No, no, they can't take that away from me'
Fred Astaire

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
My Master's thesis involved the Greene-Kleitmann Theorem,
an n-dimensional extension of Dilworth's Theorem.
Just about every theorem in Graph Theory, Zero-One Matrix
theory and Combinatorics is equivalent to Dilworth's Theorem,
if you just poke around with it enough, just like all those
NP-complete problems in computer science. Same idea, different class.

It also discussed the König-Egedvary theorem on placing queens
on a chessboard so all the ranks and files are covered,
and two other theorems I can't even remember the names of,
let alone the details. My thesis defense was a test of short-term memory.
My mother still has a copy. Ask her.