The Paper Trail

• 0: Paul Erdös: Marc A. Berger, Paul Erdös, Alexander Felzenbaum, Aviezri S. Fraenkel (1988). Nearly disjoint covering systems. Ars Comb. 25B:231-246.
• 1: Aviezri S. Fraenkel: Aviezri S. Fraenkel, Edward M. Reingold, Prashant Saxena (1994). Efficient management of dynamic tables. Information Processing Letters, 50(1):25-30.
• 2: Alberto Apostolico: Alberto Apostolico, Aviezri S. Fraenkel (1987). Robust transmission of unbounded strings using Fibonacci representations. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 33(2): 238-245.
• 3: Giorgio Satta: Alberto Apostolico, Cinzia Pizzi, Giorgio Satta (2004). Optimal Discovery of Subword Associations in Strings. Discovery Science 2004: 270-277.
• 4: Robert Frank: Robert Frank, Giorgio Satta (1998). Optimality Theory and the Generative Complexity of Constraint Violability. Computational Linguistics 24(2):307-315.
• 5: Paul Hagstrom: Robert Frank, Paul Hagstrom, K. Vijay-Shanker (2002). Roots, Constituents and C-Command. In Artemis Alexiadou (ed.), Theoretical Approaches to Universals. John Benjamins. 109-307.

Looking out for Number Zero

I did in fact even meet the man, when he came to give a talk for the Math department at Carleton College back when I was an ungraduate Math major there. But it happened in those hazily-remembered days before there was really much of a web, so I can't find an announcement or even a reference. I wonder if this page is the only page on the web remembering this event.

Our old family car has a Bacon number of 2.

Perhaps this is not as relevant, but my family's car appeared for a few seconds in the movie The Cure (1995), with Brad Renfro (BN 1), who was in Telling Lies in America (1997) with Kevin Bacon (BN 1). It's rather a stretch to say that I have a BN of 3 through this route, though I suppose I may have inadvertenly driven it in the background of some movie or other at some other point. Thanks to The Oracle of Bacon for revealing this to me.

Why I may have an Erdös-Bacon number of 8.

Another possible, and perhaps only slightly more legitimate (if appearing in movies that aired only on a local cable access channel counts), computation of my Bacon number comes via a series of movies made in the mid 80s by me and some friends for our 9th grade English class. One of those friends was Derek Hughes, who was was in Mr. Deeds (2002) with Eric Bruno Borgman, who was in Mystic River (2003) with Kevin Bacon. That'll be 3 for me. Or an Erdös-Bacon number of 8. Not the lowest, but, hey, it's finite.