Brian May's Erdős-Bacon Number
If you’ve heard of Erdős Numbers, Erdős-Bacon Numbers, and the fact that Queen lead guitarist Brian May has a PhD, you may have wondered whether Brian May (being connected to both the scientific and entertainment worlds) has a well-defined Erdős-Bacon number. As a matter of fact, he does: here’s how the rock legend is connected to the centres of cinema and academia.
Brian May’s Bacon Number: 3
It turns out that Brian May does have a Bacon Number: the Oracle of Bacon gives him a 2, but the link relies on a concert recording and feels like it’s kind of cheating. Fortunately, there is a more legitimate path of length three, thanks to the guitarist’s credited voice role as “Massed Peasant Chorus/Chamberlain” in The Adventures of Pinnochio. For the record, the links are
- Brian May –(The Prince’s Trust Rock Gala)–>
- Phil Collins –(Balto)–>
- Kevin Bacon
and
- Brian May –(The Adventures of Pinnochio)–>
- Martin Landau –(Ed Wood)–>
- Bill Murray –(Wild Things)–>
- Kevin Bacon
Brian May’s Erdős Number: 7
Thanks to IMDB, the Bacon number was the easy part to find out. The equivalent tool in mathematics is the AMS’ Collaboration Distance tool on MathSciNet. Unfortunately, astrophysics is too far removed from mathematics for the tool to catalogue, so to find Brian May’s Erdős number one has to track down papers manually. The best previous attempt I found was a path of length eight, through a popular science book cowritten by May. However, I managed to find a shorter path, starting with a letter published in Nature:
- Brian May –(Nature 240)–>
- T R Hicks –(The Astrophysical Journal 232)–>
- J P Phillips –(J. Phys. G 22)–>
- K Golec-Biernat –(Acta Phys. Polon. B 22)–>
- Th. W. Ruijgrok –(Phys. A 84)–>
- C.J. Thompson –(Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 55)–>
- Mark Kac –(Amer. J. Math 62)–>
- Paul Erdős.
This gives Brian May an Erdős-Bacon number of at most 10, and the smallest known Erdős-Bacon-Sabbath number of 11 (beating Richard Feynman, 14, and Natalie Portman, 13)!
I’m glad I’m not the only one who thought this was worth pursuing
Thanks for finding the shorter path! I’m sure we’ll eventually settle the very important question of Brian May’s Erdős number.
Truly, this must be the most pressing question of the exciting field of rockademic collaboration theory!
We can only hope that somebody eventually makes a collaboration distance tool extending beyond MathSciNet’s catalogue. I found some experimental physics papers within two links of Brian May which had hundreds of coauthors, and I don’t think I’ll get to checking all of those possible collaboration paths anytime soon!
Wow, well done finding Brian May’s Erdos number! I got bogged down by the time I got to 3 steps removed, and gave up. (Although I’m guessing that my 3 hours devoted to the search, while watching TV, was never going to be a successful search strategy.) I’m also glad to hear there’s some other people on the planet interested in this stuff. Keep up the good work!
I have an Erdős number of 5. If Brian has an Erdős number of 7, and a Sabbath number of 1, does that imply that I have a Sabbath number of (no more than) 5+7+1=13?
I suppose that depends on whether you define Sabbath numbers as a musical collaboration number or a professional collaboration number. I’ve assumed that Erdős, Bacon, and Sabbath numbers measure collaboration distance in their respective subjects (otherwise, Brian May would have an Erdős number of at most 6 through Kevin Bacon and Daniel Kleitman). But generalizing to professional collaboration number would be pretty interesting, too. As you point out, this would satisfy the triangle inequality and hence define a totally bounded metric on some gigantic set of people.
What set is this? What is its diameter? And is there somebody literally at its center (that is, someone whose distance to anybody is at most half the diameter)? More research on this subject is clearly warranted!