403: Convincing Pickup Line

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Convincing Pickup Line

Title text: Check it out; I've had sex with someone who's had sex with someone who's written a paper with Paul Erdős!

Explanation

A graph is a mathematical object consisting of nodes connected by lines called edges. The nodes could represent for example people, and the edges could represent a connection from having slept together. Now, Megan has such a graph. Arguably, a graph that is symmetric is nicer than a regular one, which is why Megan suggests that they should sleep together.

The title text is a small-world joke on the concept of Erdős number. Paul Erdős was a Hungarian mathematician renowned for his eccentricity and productivity. He holds the world record for the number of published math papers, as well as for the number of collaborative papers. A person's Erdős number is the "collaborative distance" between the person and Erdős. Paul Erdős's Erdős number is 0 by definition. All of his 511 collaborators have the Erdős number 1; anyone (excluding Erdős) who has collaborated on a mathematical or scientific paper with any of those collaborators has an Erdős number of 2, and so on. Thus, if you have written a paper with someone who's written a paper with someone who's written a paper with Paul Erdős, your Erdős number is 3. If you know a mathematician or are a mathematician you can calculate his/her/your Erdős number here.

In 599: Apocalypse Cueball actually manages to write a paper with zombie Erdős, thus making his Erdős numbers one.

Transcript

[Cueball and Megan sit at a small table in a cafe. Megan holds up a graph.]

Megan: We're a terrible match. But if we sleep together, it'll make the local hookup network a symmetric graph.

Cueball: I can't argue with that.

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Discussion

I'm more intrigued by the Erdős–Bacon number, where Natalie Portman and Carl Sagan both have a six (5+1 and 4+2 respectively). Hogtree Octovish (talk) 06:47, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia and erdosbaconsabbath.com say that Natalie Portman's EB is 7, not six. (Bacon 2, not 1.) Still awesome. gijobarts (talk) 03:36, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

There's some irony here that they both think that they are terrible matches with each other, but both like the logic of making the graph symmetrical, indicating that they probably would be a good match Zachweix (talk) 16:57, 5 November 2018 (UTC)