Vita

In the past, I used to have my Gelfand number (2), Erdös number (4), and Einstein number (5) here.

However, with the new toy "collaboration Distance" of Zentralblatt, it is easy to check that this is by no means exceptional - actually, within a half hour search, I wasn't able to find a mathematician to whom my collaboration distance was larger than 6 (if it wasn't infinity), regardless of research area or age, and the distance 6 was impossible to realize to people who are still alive. Here are some non-exhaustive examples:

Distance 3: Yurii I. Manin, John v. Neumann, Andrei N. Kolmogorov, Bernd Sturmfels...

Distance 4: David Hilbert, Friedrich Hirzebruch, Norman Steenrod, John F. Adams, Terence Tao, Alexander Grothendieck...

Distance 5: Elie Cartan, Helmut Hasse, Hermann Weyl, Emmy Noether, Stefan Banach...

Distance 6: Sophus Lie, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Bernhard Riemann...

I guess this proves that mathematicians are not always spending their time on useful things...

See also my scientific profiles at
research gate and academia.net.