by David Greenberg

Eric Rauchway's recent post introduced me to the delightful concept of the Erdös-Bacon number. But after reading Geoffrey's post, I just realized that I am only three links away from Kevin Bacon. A few years ago, I was in a documentary about the travesty of the 2000 election entitled Call It Democracy. So was Alan Dershowitz, who was in The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg with Walter Matthau, who was in JFK with Kevin Bacon. Bacon number: 3. At first, I thought I should try to obtain an Erdös-Bacon number by seeing if Geoffrey would like to co-author a paper with me. But then my brother suggested to me that Open University is, in effect, a large, collaborative, co-authored project, of which I am a co-author. So, if anyone accepts this tortured logic, my collaboration on Open U would give me an Erdös number of 6, for an Erdös-Bacon number of 9.