July 1st, 2010 posted by Bender Rodríguez
Paul Erdős was an influential and itinerant mathematician, who spent a large portion of his later life living out of a suitcase and writing papers with those of his colleagues willing to give him room and board
i just learned about the Erdős number when Jannis Leidel, a core django developer and integral part of the pinax project, joined Eldarion. from wikipedia:
The Erdős number describes the "collaborative distance" between a person and mathematician Paul Erdős, as measured by authorship of mathematical papers.
It was created by friends as a humorous tribute to the enormous output of Erdős, one of the most prolific modern writers of mathematical papers, and has become well-known in scientific circles as a tongue-in-cheek measurement of mathematical prominence.
Paul Erdős was an influential and itinerant mathematician, who spent a large portion of his later life living out of a suitcase and writing papers with those of his colleagues willing to give him room and board. He published more papers during his life (at least 1400) than any other mathematician in history.
here is the Eldarion announcement:
1st July 2010
by James Tauber in General
I'm thrilled to announce that Jannis Leidel has joined the development team at Eldarion.
Jannis (also known by his nick 'jezdez') is a core developer of Django and Pinax and chaired the recent DjangoCon.eu conference in Berlin.
Jannis will join our existing team of Brian Rosner, Alex Gaynor and Yulka Plekhanova, working on both client projects and Eldarion websites.
Jannis is to open-source software what Paul Erdős is to mathematical papers (see Erdős number for an explanation of the latter). Your "Leidel Number" is how many degrees of separation you are from Jannis in contributions to open-source projects. We're still on the lookout for anyone with a finite Erdős-Bacon-Leidel number.
"We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice - that is, until we have stopped saying 'It got lost,' and say, 'I lost it.'"
Sydney J. Harris