Chomsky’s Erdős number comes from his work with Marcel-Paul Schützenberger, which links the theory of formal languages with abstract algebra. His Bacon and Sabbath numbers stem from his role in American politics: he has appeared in any number of documentaries, and his political speeches have been sampled by musicians including Bassnectar and Buckethead.
Noam Chomsky is a linguist and political activist. In the world of linguistics, he is famous for proposing the theory of universal grammar and for his work on formal languages; in the world of politics he is a prominent American left-wing intellectual.
Chomsky’s Erdős number comes from his work with Marcel-Paul Schützenberger, which links the theory of formal languages with abstract algebra. His Bacon and Sabbath numbers stem from his role in American politics: he has appeared in any number of documentaries, and his political speeches have been sampled by musicians including Bassnectar and Buckethead.
Erdős 4
Marcel Paul Schützenberger Jeux de Nim et solutions
Claude Berge The coloring numbers of the direct product of two hypergraphs
Miklós Simonovits A limit theorem in graph theory
Paul Erdős
Bacon 3
Noam Chomsky Dead Man Working
Deirdre Brennan Blowtorch
William Baldwin Flatliners
Kevin Bacon
Sabbath 4
Noam Chomsky "Cuba on Paper" — Buckethead & Viggo Mortensen
Buckethead The Big Eyeball In The Sky — Colonel Claypool’s Bucket Of Bernie Brains
Les Claypool N.I.B. — Primus with Ozzy
Ozzy Osbourne
Credits
Discovery: January First-of-May Photo: jeanbaptisteparis (Creative Commons)