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).