Kool Mo Dee’s EBS Number
How Ya Like Me Now, number theory?
Of all the work I’ve put into EBS numbers (mainly, coming up with the idea and letting others do the hard work of figuring out the links), I’m most thrilled with tracking down the final link to complete an Erdos-Bacon-Sabbath Number for none other than Kool Moe Dee! If you’re not familiar with Kool Moe Dee, he’s a legendary old-school rapper from the 80’s. If you *are* familiar with him, you now probably have a pretty good idea how old I am. Let’s just say Hammerpants were pretty popular at my high school.
Sara (@MinervaMoon on twitter) was the first to point out that KMD has an easy-to-find Sabbath and Bacon numbers, and provided the clue to finding his Erdos number.
Sabbath Number: This one is easy peasy lemon-squeezy. Thanks to Chuck D’s guest spot on Kool Moe’s album Funke Funke Wisdom (on the song “Rise n’ Shine”), Kool Moe has a Sabbath number of four.
Bacon Number: For some reason, Kool Moe appeared in the Britney Spears’ movie Crossroads, lending some much-needed old-school flava to that Spears vehicle. This gives Moe Dee a Bacon number of 2, via Justin Long.
Erdos Number: This was the hardest, and not coincidentally, most tenuous link. We have to stretch the definition of “research publication” to near meaninglessness to get this to work. But it’s Kool Moe Dee, man! Sara pointed out that Kool Moe is the author of a book called There’s a God On The Mic: The 50 Greatest True MCs, which is an exhaustive list of his top 50 hip hop artists of all time, judged by more than a dozen metrics of rap style and technique. This book happens to be on my shelf — I told you, I’m a big fan. Chuck D wrote the foreword. In turn, Spike Lee wrote the foreword for Chuck D’s book Fight the Power: Rap, Race and Reality. Spike Lee also wrote the introduction to Malcolm X: The FBI File by Clayborne Carson. Now we’re getting somewhere — Dr. Carson is an academic historian with several publications to his credit, which enables us to work out a fairly circuitous route of coauthors over to Paul Erdos. (If you have an academic publication at all, chances are good you have a finite Erdos number, so I was thrilled when January First-of-May pointed out this link to Carson.) So he has an Erdos Number of 11, which is pretty large as Erdos numbers go, but amazingly small considering we have just linked an old-school rapper with a number theorist in less than a dozen links!!!
This gives him a total Erdos-Bacon-Sabbath number of 17. When he told you that Knowledge is King, you didn’t think he was kidding, did you?
Details
Mo Dee’s Erdos Number
(January First-of-May and myself worked out this path. Sara (@MinervaMoon on twitter) first pointed out the possibility of an Erdos number for Kool Mo, as well as his easy-to-find Bacon and Sabbath numbers.
Kool Mo Dee wrote There’s a God on the Mic, with a foreword by Chuck D
Chuck D wrote Fight the Power: Rap, Race and Reality, which has a foreword by Spike Lee
Spike Lee also wrote the introduction to Malcolm X: The FBI File, which was written by Clayborne Carson (a historian with academic publications)
Clayborne Carson to Richard H. King
Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom
Clayborne Carson, Richard H. King
American Historical Review vol 98, no 4, 1993
Richard H. King to Michael J. Shapiro
Deforming American Political Thought: Ethnicity, Facticity, and Genre Michael J. Shapiro, Richard H King
Journal: Contemporary Political Theory – CONTEMP POLIT THEORY , vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 498-500, 2007
Michael J. Shapiro to Christer Jonsson
Cognition and International Negotiation: The Historical Recovery of Discursive Space
G. Matthew Bonham, Christer Jönsson, Stefan Persson, Michael J. Shapiro
Journal: Cooperation and Conflict – COOP CONFL , vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 1-19, 1987
Christer Jonsson to Rolf Wahlstrom
Health systems research in Lao PDR: capacity development for getting research into policy and practice
Kristina Jönsson, Göran Tomson, Christer Jönsson, Sengchanh Kounnavong, Rolf Wahlström
Journal: Health Research Policy and Systems – Health Res Policy Sys , vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 11-10, 2007
Wahlstrom to Claes-Goran Ostenson
Patient-provider interaction from the perspectives of type 2 diabetes patients in Muscat, Oman: a qualitative study
Nadia Abdulhadi, Mohammed Al Shafaee, Solveig Freudenthal, Claes-Göran Östenson, Rolf Wahlström Journal: BMC Health Services Research – BMC HEALTH SERV RES , vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 162-11, 2007
Claes-Goran Ostenson to Eric S. Lander
Genetic analysis of non-insulin dependent diabetes mellitus in the GK rat (Citations: 123)
Joakim Galli, Luo-Sheng Li, Anna Glaser, Claes-Göran Östenson, Hong Jiao, Hossein Fakhrai-Rad, Howard J. Jacob, Eric S. Lander, Holger Luthman
Journal: Nature Genetics – NAT GENET , vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 31-37, 1996
Eric S. Lander is a well-known biologist with an Erdos number of 2, thanks to a coauthorship with Daniel Kleitman.
So the total Erdos Number path is:
Kool Moe Dee -> Chuck D -> Spike Lee -> Clayborne Carson -> Richard H. King -> Michael J. Shapiro -> Christer Jonsson -> Rolf Wahlstrom -> Claes-Goran Ostenson -> Eric S. Lander -> Daniel Kleitman -> Paul Erdos
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