Erdos example

Paul Erdos, the Hungarian mathematician, was famously prolific, with hundreds of collaborators in his lifetime. To honor him, mathematicians calculate their Erdos Numbers: Paul Erdos himself has an Erdos Number of zero. Everyone that he directly collaborated with has an Erdos Number of one, everyone that they collaborated with has an Erdos Number of two, and so on.

This also happens in other fields. In physics, for example, people calculate their Pauli Numbers, for Wolfgang Pauli, and of course, in the movie industry, people calculate their Bacon Numbers, for Kevin Bacon. Some very cool individuals have both an Erdos Number and a Bacon Number, allowing them to calculate their (finite) Erdos-Bacon Number. The smallest known Erdos-Bacon Number is three, and it belongs to Daniel Kleitman, a mathematician at MIT.

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