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 has a well-defined Erdős number.
As a matter of fact, he does! I traced down a collaboration path of length seven through a 1972 paper he published in Nature.
| Erdős number | Researcher | Citation |
|---|---|---|
| 7 | Brian May | MgI emission in the night sky spectrum |
| 6 | T R Hicks | The structure of NGC 7027 |
| 5 | J P Phillips | QCD: quantum chromodynamic diffraction |
| 4 | K Golec-Biernat | Integrable Hamiltonian system in 2N dimensions |
| 3 | Th W Ruijgrok | On the dynamics of a continuum spin system |
| 2 | C J Thompson | On the mathematical mechanism of phase transition |
| 1 | Mark Kac | The Gaussian law of errors in the theory of additive number theoretic functions |
| Paul Erdős |
This beats the best previous attempt I found, a path of length eight through a popular science book cowritten by May. It gives him an Erdős-Bacon number of at most 10 (and an Erdős-Bacon-Sabbath number of at most 11).