Erdős–Bacon–Sabbath Number

There was a comment on social media about how Natalie Portman was an author on papers in psychology is one of a small number of people with finite Erdős–Bacon–Sabbath numbers. That's basically the 6 degree of separation game for co-authoring papers, acting in movies and musical performances.

You can see how a well known actress could have a low 'Bacon' number, that is distance to Kevin Bacon. Natalie was in "Paris Je Taime" with Elijah Wood who was in "The Toxic Avenger Unrated" with Kevin Bacon - hence a Bacon number of two. You can use the Oracle Of Bacon to determine this number for most famous actors https://oracleofbacon.org/

The Erdős number measures proximity to mathematician by co-authorship of academic papers, and the Sabbath number is the proximity to Black Sabbath by musical recordings or performances. Natalie's EBS number is 11.

Brian Cox has lots of papers, screen appearances and even a musical career:
Erdős: 7 (particle physics papers).
Bacon: 3 (TV appearances, e.g., Stargazing Live path).
Sabbath: 3 (from his D:Ream/keyboardist career).
So his EBS number is 13

Brian May from Queen actually performed on a Black Sabbath tune, performed in movies and authored some papers - his score is a 9!

Steven Hawking's score is 8!

And I began to wonder where I ranked, because I have my name on a few papers, not very good ones, but there's a good chance a co-author might have some links that would cross from astrophysics to mathematics and back to Paul Erdős. But there's no general purpose 'Oracle of Bacon' for papers outside of mathematics, so I started out by looking for a link between myself at Brian May, since I knew he had an Erdős number of 5.

And I found a short link via the one paper I was the lead author on:
"An algorithm for determining collision probabilities between small solar system bodies"
S.P. Manley - F. Migliorini - M.E. Bailey
https://aas.aanda.org/articles/aas/full/1998/21/ds7564/ds7564.html

Fabio Migliorini was an Italian astronomer who spent some time in Armagh with me, he had a much better understanding of the science, but I was much stronger at software so he'd come with an idea, and I'd implemented it. We actually shared a flat for about 6 months, and ended up driving all the way to Italy together, he was going home and we were both attending a conference on orbital mechanics.

We also climbed a mountain near Milan together and found that there was someone on the top selling drinks and snacks, he was famous for climbing it every day to sell to visitors. Based on my memories this was probably Grignetta, but I can't be sure.

The reason I'm talking a lot about Fabio was he ended up dying in a climbing accident less than a year later. That was before I published my paper with him.

Anyway, Fabio also worked with Patrick Michel who I know from asteroid research:
"Origin of Multikilometer Earth- and Mars-Crossing Asteroids: A Quantitative Simulation"
https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.281.5385.2022

And Patrick is named on a couple of paper's where Brian May turns up, Brian loves to make stereoscopic image of astronomical objects so he's got a few papers from this kind of work.
"A contact binary satellite of the asteroid (152830) Dinkinesh"
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07378-0

So, based on this I'm 3 degrees from Brian May and so my Erdős number is at most 8.

But what about movies, do I have a Bacon number? Well as it turns out, I did work with the producers of Stowaway and offer all sorts of advice and even created some visualizations of the spacecraft using Kerbal Space Program. There's a bunch of things in the movie that were my idea, and, right at the start, there's a set of voices from Mission control, these include a line from me and a few other people who helped behind the scenes. So technically I'm in a movie with Anna Kendrick, Daniel Dae Kim, Shamier Anderson and Toni Collette, yes it's a small cast because it's 4 people on a spaceship. Everyone on that cast has a Bacon number of 2.

So I guess I can claim a Bacon number of 3, for one line in a movie, it's not much but it counts, besides, I have contributions beyond that one line.

Now, how about that Sabbath number? Well I do have some musical links, but I'm most a DJ playing other people's tunes so that's not really a performance, I can't cheat my way to a Sabbath number by sampling. However at the astro awards I created "Eat Sleep Space Repeat", which is a remix/reimagining of Fatboy Slim's "Eat Sleep Rave Repeat". I don't think it's fair to claim a link to Norman Cook because I remixed his tune either.

But when I was in Austin for SXSW I was there to play records at the Space House event, and again I brought "Eat Sleep Space Repeat", and the tune was so popular I brought it back for the end of the set. And as this comes on Cady Coleman walks up to the stage to say farewell, instead, I invite her on to the stage and we both chant "Eat Sleep Space Repeat" into the microphone. This moment was thankfully captured on camera: https://www.instagram.com/p/DV7fKy7jjvZ/

Now Cady is a wonderful person, a wonderfully human astronaut, and while on the ISS she recorded a flute duet with Ian Anderson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeC4nqBB5BM

Ian Anderson is of course a founding member of Jethro Tull, which at one point included Tony Iommi in its line up, Tony is co-Founder of Black Sabbath

Which basically means I have a Sabbath number of 3.

So I figured I have an EBS number of <=14, but, I wondered if there were shorter routes on the Erdős number, because I'd simply found a set of links that had worked, not the shortest one by any means.

Well, while at Apple an intern published a paper on machine learning which used some of my code and so I got included as an author. https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/improving-human-annotation

I wondered whether this might make for a shorter link, because Machine learning is much closer to mathematics and therefore likely to be closer to Erdős. And indeed after looking at the list of authors I found an Erdős number of 6. Mina Farid worked with Ihab Ilyas who has an Erdős number of 4!

So, that means I get to claim a EBS number of 12, not bad.

But after posting this on X Tom Duff speculated on his own status. Tom Duff is infamous for "Duff's Device" a construct in C which breaks people's heads, he invented this while working on early computer graphics at Lucasfilm, he moved to Pixar and along the way appears to have enough music credits to give him an EBS number of 8, which puts him in the same tier at Stephen Hawking!

Why did I write all this? I don't know, I guess I like doing strange esoteric things.