h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

For a number of years mathematicians have been playing a similar game but using the hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos as the start point. A persons Erdos number is the number of academics linking person A with Erdos through co-authoring mathematical papers.
Erdos travelled a lot during his lifetime and published many mathematical papers.
There are currently 507 people with an Erdos number of 1 and 6127 with an Erdos number of 2
[URL removed by moderator]is the homepage of the Erdos number project.

Solsbury who has no Erdos number that he knows of.

Methinks the number of people with an Erdos number of 1 is destined to remain constant.

Although Paul Erdos did indeed die a few years back (1996) papers where he is a co-author are still being published. So the number of people with an Erdos number of 1 isn't quite as constant as you might think
According to the Erdos number project homepage, he's got over 1500 papers published to jan 2001 (this is apparently the highest for any mathematician ever).

Oh. I didn't know that. *grumble*

I knew he was pretty prolific, that's why he was chosen. He was also pretty weird.

The things you find fiddling round on the web

I wonder what the equivalent H2G2 thing would be (and if the community is large enough to make it a viable sample population).

How do you mean? Linking people based on joint articles?

Conversations as well? A conversation should require direct juxtaposition. By the by, it'd be helpful for this article to include the Six Degrees of Separation origin of the Kevin Bacon game -- this game arose from a theory, not out of the blue. _The Tipping Point_ by Malcolm Gladwell illuminates this, among other epidemiological phenomena.