Math Narcissism
A couple years ago, I learned about this thing called the Mathematics Genealogy Project. It’s a math family tree based on mathematicians who have earned their PhD. A mathematician’s parent is their PhD advisor. It’s very neat how few links it takes to link one of your own math professors to famous mathematicians. Only four links up, one of my professors is linked to Neumann and Klein. Anyone heard of the klein bottles? Following Klein up, you have Lipschitz. And then Martin Ohm, the little brother of Georg Ohm, of which Ohm’s Law is named after. Another fun thing to do is see how close of cousins two randomly picked math professors are. Another math professor of mine is five links away from Klein, also. They are math fifth cousins.
On a similar note, there was this mathematican named Paul Erdös. He was one of those who didn’t really live anywhere, but traveled around everywhere. He stayed at fellow mathematicians’ houses for months at a time. During his stays, he would work on a math problem with that friend until they solved it. He would publish a paper on that particular problem with his friend, and then move on to the next friend. As a result, he published a ton of papers, around 1,500 with over 500 colloborators. This thing emerged in the math world known as the Erdös number. If you published a paper with Erdös himself, then you had an Erdös number 1. If you published a paper with someone who published a paper with Erdös, then you had a number 2. And so on. This idea was so cool to me. My undergraduate advisor is an Erdös number 2. If only I could publish a paper with him, I would have an Erdös number 3. And that would just be the coolest thing ever.
One time in a class, one of my professor was talking about this, the math genealogy tree and Erdös numbers. He asked us why we thought that mathematicians did these things. This sort of ranking in the math world. I answered because mathematicians are a little egotistical. I picked the wrong word, because the class ooh-ed, and that’s not what I intended. I mean, I’m the same way. A friend of mine saved me with the word narcissistic. Mathematicians are extremely proud of their accomplishments. Narcissistic, even.