Douglas W. Jones Erdos Number

Citations

One of the most interesting ways to evaluate a researcher is to look at how many highly cited publications they have. The H-Index (developed by Jorge Hirsch at UCSD) asks, for example, for the number of papers cited by at least that many other papers.

Here is an attempt at this, although Google Scholar and similar citation databases had real difficulty disambiguating the different authors named Douglas Jones. In addition, some articles are indexed under multiple variant titles because authors don't always cite things accurately. For example, some authors cite the web site from which they downloaded an electronic copy of the paper instead of the journal in which it was published. In the following, the notation 3 + 2 means the search engine mentioned found 3 citations under one title plus 2 under another.

1. Google 158 -- An empirical comparison of priority queue and event set implementations
2. Google 78 + 2 + 2 + 4 -- Applications of Splay Trees to Data Compression
3. Google 65 -- Concurrent operations on priority queues
4. Google 10 + 10 + 1 + 1 + 2 -- Control of Stepping Motors
5. Google 23 -- Concurrent simulation: An alternative to distributed simulation
6. Google 18 -- with C-C. Chou, D. Renk, and S. C. Bruell. Experience with concurrent simulation
7. Google 17 -- The Ultimate RISC
8. Google 7 + 6 + 2 + 1 -- A Brief Illustrated History of Voting
9. Google 11 -- Auditing Elections
10. Google 8 + 3 -- The Case of the Diebold FTP Site
11. Google 7 + 1 -- Problems with Voting Systems and the Applicable Standards
12. Google 3 + 3 + 1 -- Chain Voting

Tentatively, then, as of late April, 2008, I have an H-Index of 10.

Erdos Number

A person's Erdös number is the length of the chain of co-authored publications linking that person to the prolific mathematician Paul Erdös. Since Erdös' primary contribution to mathematics may well have been the number of papers he coauthored during his career, this number is of little practical use except perhaps as a source of illustrations for discussions of graph theory.

Douglas Jones (Erdös number 4), coauthor of Evaluation of Voting Systems with:

• David Chaum (Erdös number 3), coeditor of Proceedings of CRYPTO '82 with:
  • Ron Rivest (Erdös number 2), coauthor of An Omega(n² log n) Lower Bound to the Shortest Paths Problem with:
    • David M. Avis (Erdös number 1) coauthor of Distinct Distances Determined by a Subset of Points in Space with:
      • Paul Erdös.

• David Dill (Erdös number no greater than 3), coauthor of A Specification Methodology by a Collection of Compact Properties as Applied to the Intel Itanium Processor Bus Protocol with:
  • Ching-Tzun Chou (Erdös number 2), coauthor of Synchronizing Asynchronous Bounded Delay Networks with:
    • Schmuel Zaks (Erdös number 1), coauthor of Minimum-Diameter Cyclic Arrangements in Mapping Data Flow Graphs onto VLSI Arrays with:
      • Paul Erdös.

Bacon Number

A person's Bacon number is defined similarly to the Erdös number, but using the relationship "appeared in the same movie as" instead of "coauthored a paper with" and counting from the actor Kevin Bacon instead of the mathematician Paul Erdös. Bacon numbers have about as much utility as Erdös numbers, except that some of the names are more glamorous.

I've never acted in a movie, but I'm listed in IMDB, so if I widen the definition of a Bacon number just a bit to include any credited role in a film, I can claim a Bacon number of 3:

Douglas Jones (Bacon number 3?), Credited technical advisor to Hacking Democracy narrated by:

• James Naughton (Bacon number 2), who played Stephen in The Devil Wears Prada, where Miranda Priestly was played by:
  • Meryl Streep (Bacon number 1), who played Gail Hartman in The River Wild, where Wade was played by:
    • Kevin Bacon