{"id":146,"date":"2026-01-14T16:07:39","date_gmt":"2026-01-14T23:07:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/faculty.engineering.asu.edu\/xue\/?page_id=146"},"modified":"2026-01-14T16:07:39","modified_gmt":"2026-01-14T23:07:39","slug":"erdos-number","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/faculty.engineering.asu.edu\/xue\/erdos-number\/","title":{"rendered":"Erdos Number"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oakland.edu\/enp\/\">Erdos number<\/a> is <strong>2<\/strong>. Paul Erdos&#8217;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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Here is a list of my papers in which I collaborated with <strong>researchers<\/strong> who are co-authors of <a href=\"http:\/\/www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk\/~history\/Mathematicians\/Erdos.html\">Paul Erdos<\/a> (1913-1996).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>C.J. Colbourn<\/strong> and Guoliang Xue;<br>&#8220;A linear time algorithm for computing the most reliable source on a series-parallel graph with unreliable edges&#8221;;<br><em>Theoretical Computer Science <\/em>; Vol. 209(1998), pp. 331-345.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>C.J. Colbourn<\/strong> and Guoliang Xue;<br>&#8220;Grade of service Steiner trees in series-parallel networks&#8221;;<br>in Ding-Zhu Du, J.M. Smith, and J.H. Rubinstein, eds.,<br><em>Advances in Steiner Trees <\/em>; Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000, pp. 163-174.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Reid Andersen, <strong>Fan Chung<\/strong>, Arunabha Sen, Guoliang Xue;<br>&#8220;On disjoint path pairs with wavelength continuity constraint in WDM networks&#8221;;<br><em>IEEE INFOCOM&#8217;04<\/em><strong> <\/strong>; March 7-11, 2004, Hong Kong, China, pp. 524-535.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p class=\"mb-2\">My Erdos number is 2. Paul Erdos&#8217;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,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":502,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-146","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/faculty.engineering.asu.edu\/xue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/faculty.engineering.asu.edu\/xue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/faculty.engineering.asu.edu\/xue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/faculty.engineering.asu.edu\/xue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/502"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/faculty.engineering.asu.edu\/xue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/faculty.engineering.asu.edu\/xue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/146\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/faculty.engineering.asu.edu\/xue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}