From a tweet:
Joel Golby ?@joelgolby
IMPORTANT: if you type “bacon number” + any actor name into Google it will tell you how many degrees of separation they are from Kevin Bacon
Damn, it’s true!
Simon Phillips’s Bacon number is 3
Simon Phillips and Kierston Wareing appeared in Bonded by Blood.
Kierston Wareing and Michael Fassbender appeared in Fish Tank.
Michael Fassbender and Kevin Bacon appeared in X-Men: First Class
This is the ‘degrees of separation’ lark: how many connections need to be followed to link actor X and Kevin Bacon. X acted in a movie with Y who was in a movie with Z who was in a movie with Bacon, so that’s three degrees of separation.
Meanwhile, for a more renaissance-man style of connections, there’s the Erdös-Bacon-Sabbath number.
This one combines that with degrees of separation from the band Black Sabbath and academic collaborations with mathematician Paul Erdös.
His initial results were Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking
, Brian May (the astrophysicist, formerly the guitarist from Queen) and … Natalie Portman!