Books By Gary Chartrand - Author

Six Degrees of Paul Erdos Contrary to popular belief, mathematicians do quite often have fun. Take, for example, the phenomenon of the Erdos number. Paul Erdos (1913-1996), a prominent and productive Hungarian mathematician who traveled the world collaborating with other mathematicians on his research papers. Ultimately, Erdos published about 1,400 papers, by far the most published by any individual mathematician. About 1970, a group of Erdos's friends and collaborators created the concept of the "Erdos number" to define the "collaborative distance" between Erdos and other mathematicians. Erdos himself was assigned an Erdos number of 0. A mathematician who collaborated directly with Erdos himself on a paper (there are 511 such individuals) has an Erdos number of 1. A mathematician who collaborated with one of those 511 mathematicians would have an Erdos number of 2, and so on - there are several thousand mathematicians with a 2. From this humble beginning, the mathematical elaboration of