Showing posts with label The Big Bang Theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Big Bang Theory. Show all posts

Saturday, October 27, 2012

My Erdős–Bacon Number


Mayim Bialik’s Erdos-Bacon number is 7.  Dr. Bialik was the central character in the 1990's sitcom Blossom and now plays Dr. Amy Farrah Fowler on my now-favorite television comedy, The Big Bang Theory.  In between, she earned a doctorate in neuroscience from UCLA.  Wikipedia

Mayim Bialik’s Erdos-Bacon number is 7.  Mine is non-existent.  Apparently, so is Kevin Bacon’s (the ‘Bacon’ of the Erdős-Bacon number) as he has presumably not authored a mathematical paper linking back to Erdős.  Too funny - Kevin Bacon can’t even play the game of which he is one half.

If we stretched a bit, I could have a Bacon number of 2, as I faithfully watched and was a fan of Bacon’s wife Kyra Sedgwick in The Closer.  And maybe I can finagle a math credit somehow for some of my grade school algebraic machinations.

A stretch, I know.

But aren’t scientists cute?  They’ve actually tried to make what is clearly a “I know somebody famous” exercise into a scholarly pursuit, labeling it an effort to measure the “small world phenomena in academia and entertainment” Wikipedia: Erdos-Bacon number The point of the exercise is to track your own degrees of separation from a mathematician and a movie star and add the two together to arrive at your own number.

In other words, I know somebody famous!  And I know them closer/better/with more bragging rights than you!

Like I said, it’s very cute.

Hey, I once saw John Larroquette in an airport in Toronto.

Better yet, I once chased Jimmy Fallon in his limo as he departed from an SNL taping.  You had to be there – let’s just say that a mom will do a lot for a beloved step-daughter, even at 2 a.m in NYC.  So – Jimmy Fallon and Kevin Bacon appeared in the same article in Deadline Hollywood

And I actually have been in a film (about peacemaking) and I’m pretty sure Kevin Bacon is a fan of world peace.  I know, I know, I really don’t get the concept, do I?

But that’s my story and I’m sticking to it: I have Bacon score of 2 and an Erdos score of 2 trillion (it takes awhile to get from my grade school self to Dr. Erdős), giving me an Erdős-Bacon score of 2 trillion and 2.

Top that!