Brian May’s Erdös-Bacon Number
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 (being connected to both the scientific and entertainment worlds) has a well-defined Erdős-Bacon number. As a matter of fact, he does: here's how the rock legend is connected to the centres of cinema and academia.
Brian May's Bacon Number: 3
It turns out that Brian May does have a Bacon Number: the Oracle of Bacon gives him a 2, but the link relies on a concert recording and feels like it's kind of cheating. Fortunately, there is a more legitimate path of length three, thanks to the guitarist's credited voice role as "Massed Peasant Chorus/Chamberlain" in The Adventures of Pinnochio. For the record, the links are
- Brian May --(The Prince's Trust Rock Gala)-->
- Phil Collins --(Balto)-->
- Kevin Bacon
and
- Brian May --(The Adventures of Pinnochio)-->
- Martin Landau --(Ed Wood)-->
- Bill Murray --(Wild Things)-->
- Kevin Bacon
Brian May's Erdős Number: 7
Thanks to IMDB, the Bacon number was the easy part to find out. The equivalent tool in mathematics is the AMS' Collaboration Distance tool on MathSciNet. Unfortunately, astrophysics is too far removed from mathematics for the tool to catalogue, so to find Brian May's Erdős number one has to track down papers manually. The best previous attempt I found was a path of length eight, through a popular science book cowritten by May. However, I managed to find a shorter path, starting with a letter published in Nature:
- Brian May --(Nature 240)-->
- T R Hicks --(The Astrophysical Journal 232)-->
- J P Phillips --(J. Phys. G 22)-->
- K Golec-Biernat --(Acta Phys. Polon. B 22)-->
- Th. W. Ruijgrok --(Phys. A 84)-->
- C.J. Thompson --(Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 55)-->
- Mark Kac --(Amer. J. Math 62)-->
- Paul Erdős.
This gives Brian May an Erdős-Bacon number of at most 10, and the smallest known Erdős-Bacon-Sabbath number of 11 (beating Richard Feynman, 14, and Natalie Portman, 13)!
