Hank Aaron and Paul Erdos

Jeremy, who is a high school physics teacher from the Sierra Leone, wrote to me with the correct answers to yesterday's little bit of trivia. He told me that he even shared it with his students, who rather enjoyed it. Iain Cash, who confessed to sharing my love for useless knowledge, also knew the right answer. (The rest of you who admitted to using wikipedia won't get any partial credit for honesty or for research).

Hank Aaron is jokingly said to have an Erdos number of 1, because both he and Paul Erdos autographed the same baseball when Emory University awarded them honorary degrees on the same day.

Those of you who think that looking up people's Erdos numbers is absolutely the dorkiest thing anyone could ever do, have obviously never heard of the "Kasparov number" or the "Morphy number". The Oracle of Baseball applies this idea to baseball players, and the ACM does it for theoretical computer science.

Are we having a good time yet?