I am pleased to report that I have an Erdös-Bacon-Sabbath number.
My Erdös number is 3; has been for a while, probably always will be. I wrote a paper with Mike Bennett and Nathan Ng about solutions to A^4 + B^2 = C^p; Mike wrote with Florian Luca; Luca wrote with Erdös.
A while back, I shot a scene for the movie Gifted. I’m not on the IMDB page yet, but I play against type as “Professor.” Also in this movie is Octavia Spencer, who was in Beauty Shop (2005) with Kevin Bacon. So my Bacon number is 2.
That gives me an Erdös-Bacon number of 5; already pretty high on the leaderboard!
Of course it then fell to me to figure out whether I have a Sabbath number. Here’s the best chain I could make.
I once played guitar on “What Goes On” with my friend Jay Michaelson‘s band, The Swains, at Brownies.
Jay performed with Ezra Lipp “sometime in 2000,” he reports.
Lipp has played with Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes.
From here we use the Six Degrees of Black Sabbath tool, written by Paul Lamere at EchoNest (now part of the Spotify empire.)
The Black Crowes backed up Jimmy Page at a concert in 1999.
Page played with David Coverdale in Coverdale.Page.
David Coverdale was in Deep Purple with Glenn Hughes of Black Sabbath.
So my Sabbath number is 6, and my Erdos-Bacon-Sabbath number is 11.
Quomodocumque 