I have a favour to ask of all of you. Go and fill in SciLink's Tree of Science (you'll have to sign up to SciLink first). Why? Well it is very interesting to see how different scientists are connected. And on top of that we can settle a longstanding dispute - what is the appropriate Erdos Number for biologists.
You might be asking, what is the Erdos Number? or who was Paul Erdos Number? From an old post by RPM:
Paul Erdos was an extremely prolific and mobile mathematician who has left a legacy in academia in the form of the Erdos Number -- a count of your "academic distance" from Erdos. Anyone who published a paper with Erdos has an Erdos number of one (Erdos, himself, had a number of zero), people who published with anyone with an Erdos number of one have an Erdos number of two, and so on. It's a point of pride for a mathematician or other researcher to have a small Erdos number.
But who exactly? As a cell biologist I would say that George Palade and Keith Porter would be a good start. Another possibility would be Watson and Crick. In any case to figure out the biology equivalent we would need some sort of repository, or even better some navigational network that lets you explore any possible connection. And now we have the perfect application.
I must say that SciLink's Tree of Science is more of a Genealogical tree ... as in "X mentored Y" as opposed to "X coauthored a paper with Y". In fact some connections such as "coworkers" may not be represented in coauthorships. For example, I never published a paper with my coworker Bil, but we are connected in this tree by the fact that we were in the Rapoport lab at the same time. The opposite problem also occurs. For example, I coauthored a paper with Rich Vallee but according to the current version of the tree we are 4 degrees apart. Of course I could link us up directly ...
Here are some other interesting connections. I am
- 3 degrees away from Jeff Schatz (actually this should be 2)
- 3 degrees away from George Palade (although one connection is very small, my current postdoc advisor was a visiting scientist in Gunter Blobel's lab)
- 3 degrees of separation from Gary Borisy
- 3 degrees away from Peter Moore and 2 away from Venki Ramakrischnan (thanks Bil)
Let's take advantage of this user generated content filled application. Plus, it's a great way to kill time in between those long time points.
- Log in to post comments
As explained here on Personomics, there exists a tool out there called InterMedi, that performs nearly the same task as SciLink and even more, but without the need of input of information about the users, the researchers, etc.
Have fun!
I did something similar on suicyte notes , you are mentioned there, too.
One more thing: I could imagine that many bloggers will be reluctant to register at Scilink. As Neil pointed out on his blog , it is easy to get in, but you can't get out again.
Biologists usually have an Erdos number via Eugene Koonin (Erdos 2) or John Maynard Smith (Erdos 4). Mine's 7 by the shortest route I've found so far.
don't forget the Erdos-Bacon number:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93Bacon_number
This post led, in a very roundabout way, to my discovery of http://neurotree.org/. For my field, at least, this is a surprisingly comprehensive list of intellectual lineages. It doesn't exactly give the same feel as the SciLink tree, as this one is really focuses on the mentor student relationship, but it is really amazing how much history of who was whose student is preserved there. Although it purports to be focused on neuroscience, it goes so far back that it includes people like Thomas Henry Huxley at http://neurotree.org/neurotree/tree.php?pid=524 , Linnaeus at http://neurotree.org/neurotree/tree.php?pid=11124 .
The American Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET) has set up a similar project to determine one's "Abel Number": the degrees one is away from my blog namesake, John Jacob Abel. Abel is considered the American pioneer of the discipline of pharmacology having established the first dept at Michigan and another at Hopkins. He went on to launch the Journal of Biological Chemistry and the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.
Although I earned my PhD in pharmacology, my mentor's lineage tracks back through molecular biologists and biochemists, not to Abel.
I'm a behavioural psychologist, but my Erdos number is 5 because I've published with a physicist heavily involved in the development of fMRI. :-)
Sorry to say that I'm not getting you too far on this here tree although you are doing wonders for me. You might want to check out Neurotree as well. I could hook you up with some real luminaries over there (no less than Ramon y Cajal) if only they counted blog friends :-)
Just curious, was there something wrong with my comment posted on July 25? Maybe it is not ok to include a http link?
Sorry kay, I just de-spammed you. The more URLs a comment has, the more likely our spam filter freaks out. In the future feel free to post URLs, just email me if the comment doesn't appear right away.