Erdos Number

My Erdos number is 2. Paul Erdos’s Erdos number is 0. Paul Erdos has 509 coauthors, those whose Erdos number is 1. I have never published a joint paper with Paul Erdos, but have published with people (C.J. Colbourn and F. Chung) whose Erdos number is 1. Therefore my Erdos number is 2.

Let G(V, E) be an undirected graph, where each vertex in V corresponding to a person who has published, the set of edges E consists of all un-ordered pairs of vertices (u, v) such that the person corresponding to u and the person corresponding to v are coauthors of at least one paper. Let d(v) be the shortest path from v to the node corresponding to Paul Erdos, measured by the number of edges on the path. Then the person corresponding to node v has Erdos number d(v).

Here is a list of my papers in which I collaborated with researchers who are co-authors of Paul Erdos (1913-1996).

• C.J. Colbourn and Guoliang Xue;
  “A linear time algorithm for computing the most reliable source on a series-parallel graph with unreliable edges”;
  Theoretical Computer Science ; Vol. 209(1998), pp. 331-345.
• C.J. Colbourn and Guoliang Xue;
  “Grade of service Steiner trees in series-parallel networks”;
  in Ding-Zhu Du, J.M. Smith, and J.H. Rubinstein, eds.,
  Advances in Steiner Trees ; Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000, pp. 163-174.
• Reid Andersen, Fan Chung, Arunabha Sen, Guoliang Xue;
  “On disjoint path pairs with wavelength continuity constraint in WDM networks”;
  IEEE INFOCOM’04 ; March 7-11, 2004, Hong Kong, China, pp. 524-535.