For details check out this site about The Erdos Number Project. Briefly Paul Erdos is the most highly published with mathmatician with the most number of co-authors. His has an Erdos number of 0. His co-authors have an Erdos number of 1. Anyone who co-authors with them gets a number of 2, and so on. From that site, a frequency of Erdos Numbers is given below
Erdos number 0 --- 1 person Erdos number 1 --- 502 people Erdos number 2 --- 5713 people Erdos number 3 --- 26422 people Erdos number 4 --- 62136 people Erdos number 5 --- 66157 people Erdos number 6 --- 32280 people Erdos number 7 --- 10431 people Erdos number 8 --- 3214 people Erdos number 9 --- 953 people Erdos number 10 --- 262 people Erdos number 11 --- 94 people Erdos number 12 --- 23 people Erdos number 13 --- 4 people Erdos number 14 --- 7 people Erdos number 15 --- 1 person Erdos number 16 --- 0 people
My first paper with George Marsaglia (Erdos Number 3) was
An Algorithm for the Area of the Union of a Collection of Convex Sets, Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation, 31, No. 1, 46-49, 1989, (with G. Marsaglia and Y. L. Zheng)
My first paper where the only co-author was George Marsaglia was
George Marsaglia, and Arif Zaman, Random Selection of Subsets with Specified Element Probabilities, Communications in Statistics, 19, No. 11, 4419-4434, 1990
George Marsaglia (Erdos Number 3) wrote a paper with George P. H. Styan (Erdos Number 2)
George Marsaglia and George P. H. Styan, Equalities and inequalities for ranks of matrices, Linear and Multilinear Algebra 2 (1974), 269-292.
Goerge P. H. Styan (EN2) was a co-author with Frank Harary (EN1)
Frank Harary (EN1) wrote two joint papers with Paul Erdos
Last updated: Jun 24, 2004