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A person's Erdős-Bacon number is the sum of their Erdős number and their Bacon number. To have a finite Erdős-Bacon number, one must therefore have both appeared in a film and co-authored an academic paper.

For a time, the sole person with the lowest known Erdős-Bacon number was Brian Greene. He appeared in Frequency with John Di Benedetto, who was in Sleepers with Kevin Bacon, for a Bacon number of 2. He also wrote a paper with Shing-Tung Yau, who wrote a paper with Ronald Graham, who wrote a paper with Paul Erdős, for an Erdős number of 3 and a combined Erdős-Bacon number of 5.

Brian Greene was later matched by Dave Bayer, mathematical consultant to A Beautiful Mind who received a minor role on screen in the movie. Rance Howard was also in A Beautiful Mind and in Apollo 13 with Kevin Bacon to give Bayer a Bacon number of 2. Bayer wrote a paper with Persi Diaconis, who has an Erdős number of 1 due to a jointly authored 1977 Stanford technical report, later published in a 2004 compilation. So Bayer's Erdős-Bacon number is 4.

Danica McKellar, most famous for her role as Winnie Cooper in The Wonder Years, has an Erdős-Bacon number of 6.

Daniel Kleitman, a mathematician at MIT, was an advisor for the movie Good Will Hunting and appeared briefly as an uncredited extra. Minnie Driver appeared in that movie, and she also appeared in Sleepers with Kevin Bacon. So Kleitman's Bacon number is 2. On the other hand, he coauthored a paper with Erdős. This gives him an Erdős-Bacon number of 3. This would probably be the infimum of the set of all existing Erdős-Bacon numbers. The only way a lower number could be achieved would be for Kevin Bacon to appear in a movie with an individual having an Erdős number of 1, which would give that person an Erdős-Bacon number of 2, or for Bacon to co-author an academic paper with someone with an Erdős number of 1, which would give Bacon himself an Erdős-Bacon number of 2.

Hank Aaron, a baseball player, is sometimes also considered to have an Erdõs-Bacon number of 3, as he and Erdős both autographed a baseball (for which is he jokingly referred to as having Erdős number of 1), and he also appeared in Summer Catch with Susan Gardner, who was in In The Cut with Bacon.

Erdős himself seems to have an undefined Erdős-Bacon number as well. While Erdős' Erdős number is clearly 0, his Bacon number is likely undefined; it was previously believed to be lower due to a conflation of similarly named persons. Similarly, Bacon's Erdős number is likely undefined. Relaxing the definition of Bacon number to include crew, however, yields an Erdős-Bacon number of 3 for Erdős. He appeared in the documentary N is a number: A Portrait of Paul Erdős, with original music by Mark Adler, who also provided music for The Rat Pack, which co-starred Joe Mantegna, who appeared with Bacon in Queens Logic.

External links

• Erdős-Bacon Numbers - Written for the Daily Telegraph, April 2002
• The Erdős Number Project
• Boing Boing directory article
• BBC Radio 4 - A Further 5 Numbers

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