semantics etc.

Kai von Fintel's website

My Erdös Number Is 8

Chris Potts has put up a chart of Erds Numbers for Umass Linguists) in the weekly What’s Happening in South College (WHISC) newsletter. Looking at the chart, I just realized that I have a finite Erds Number: it is 8! The path goes from Paul Erds) to Ivan Niven to Samuel Eilenberg to Marcel-Paul Schtzenberger to Noam Chomsky to Morris Halle to David Embick to Sabine Iatridou and then to me. To substantiate this claim, here is a hastily assembled bibliography:

  • Paul Erds and Ivan Niven.1946. “Some properties of partial sums of the harmonic series”. Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 52, 248—-251.\ * Samuel Eilenberg and Ivan Niven. 1944. “The ‘fundamental theorem of algebra’ for quaternions”. Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 50, 246—-248.
  • Samuel Eilenberg and Marcel-Paul Schtzenberger. 1969. “Rational sets in commutative monoids”. Journal of Algebra 13, 173—-191.\ * Noam Chomsky and Marcel Paul Schtzenberger. 1963. “The algebraic theory of context free languages” in Computer Programming and Formal Languages, P.Braffort, D.Hirschberg ed. North-Holland, Amsterdam, pages 118—-161.
  • Noam Chomsky, Morris Halle, and Fred Lukoff. 1956. “On Accent and Juncture in English.” In For Roman Jakobson. Mouton.
  • David Embick and Morris Halle. 2003. Explorations in the Latin Conjugation. Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Sabine Iatridou and David Embick. 1997. “Apropos pro”. Language 73 (1), 58—-78.\ * Kai von Fintel and Sabine Iatridou. 2003. “Epistemic Containment”. Linguistic Inquiry 34 , 173—-198.

According to the trivia) page of the Erds Number Project](http://www.oakland.edu/enp/)), “the distribution of Erds numbers is such that almost every mathematician with a finite Erds number has a number of less than 8 — only about 2% are higher, and none is more than 15.” So, my number 8 is less than impressive, but at least I am connected to the graph. Then again, as John McCarthy pointed out to Chris Potts, according to the Extended Erds Number Project](http://web.aanet.com.au/image/erdos/)), there is a horse with an Erds Number of 3.