Return to Philippe Flajolet's Home Page

Everybody knows about the Erdös number that measures your distance to Paul Erdös in terms of the shortest chain of coauthors. (For nonmathematicians P. Erdös was one of the greatest mathematician of the [20th] century with about 1,500 published papers and 500 different coauthors.) Well, plagiarizing Doron Zeilberger, the inspired poet of modern combinatorial analysis, I have tried to determine some of my other "numbers"...


My Flajolet number is 0. I thought I was the only person with that peculiar feature till I discovered that the Library of Congress catalogues a paper of 1913 (No, it's not me :-)): If you wonder, this paper was in fact coauthored by my grand-father who was at the time an astronomer at the Observatory of Lyon.


I am extremely proud of my Knuth number that is equal to 1 via the path:


For multiple (and happy) reasons, my Odlyzko number is also 1.


Consequently, my Erdös number is 2 (by way of Odlyzko, but also Richmond), a property that I share in fact with more than 5,000 scientists.


My Wiles number is equal to 4 (Gee!) via the path:


I am ashamed of my Zeilberger number that is only 3:


But, thanks to Doron (Zeilberger), my Einstein number is as low as 6: