In the comments to my post on Bacon numbers below, I noted that my Erdős number was 8, but then revised it to 6. Here's what I previously thought my chain was:

1. P. Erdos, C.D. Godsil, S.G. Krantz & T.D. Parsons, Intersection graphs for families of balls in R^n, European J. Combin. 9 (1988), no. 5, 501-505.

2. Steven G. Krantz & Norberto Salinas, Proper holomorphic mappings and the Cowen-Douglas class, Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 117 (1993), no. 1, 99-105.

3. Gregory T. Adams, Paul J. McGuire, Norberto Salinas & Allen R. Schweinsberg, Analytic finite band width reproducing kernels and operator weighted shifts, J. Operator Theory 51 (2004), no. 1, 35-48.

4. Ariel Pakes & Paul McGuire, Stochastic algorithms, symmetric Markov perfect equilibrium, and the "curse" of dimensionality, Econometrica 69 (2001), no. 5, 1261-1281.

5. Laurence J. Kotlikoff, & Ariel Pakes, Looking for the news in the noise. Additional stochastic implications of optimal consumption choice, Ann. Econom. Statist. 1988, no. 9, 29-46.

6. Laurence J. Kotlikoff & Lawrence H. Summers, Tax incidence, Handbook of public economics, Vol. II, 1043-1092, Handbooks in Econom., 4, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1987.

7. B. De Long, A. Shleifer, L. Summers & R. Waldmann, Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets, Journal of Political Economy, August 1990, reprinted in Richard H. Thaler, ed., Advances in Behavioral Finance, Russell Sage Foundation, 1993.

8. Juan Carlos Botero, Rafael La Porta, Florencio López-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer & Alexander Volokh, Judicial Reform, World Bank Research Observer 18 (2003), no. 1, pp. 61-88.

This took us through my industrial organization professor Ariel Pakes, former Harvard president Larry Summers, and my adviser Andrei Shleifer. But yesterday I discovered a new chain, of length 6 instead of 8, through Shechao Charles Feng, my one-time co-author on an L.A. Times op-ed on affirmative action, later reprinted in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, once of the UCLA Physics Department:

1. P. Erdős, A. Rényi & V.T. Sós, On a problem of graph theory, Studia Sci. Math. Hungar. 1 (1966), pp. 215-235.

2. Christian Borgs, Jennifer Chayes, László Lovász, Vera T. Sós & Katalin Vesztergombi, Counting graph homomorphisms, Algorithms Combin. 26 (2006), pp. 315-371.

3. J.T. Chayes, L. Chayes, Daniel S. Fisher & T. Spencer, Finite-Size Scaling and Correlation Lengths for Disordered Systems, Phys. Rev. Letters 57 (1986), no. 24, pp. 2999-3002.

4. Daniel S. Fisher & Patrick A. Lee, Relation between conductivity and transmission matrix, Phys. Rev. B 23 (1981), no. 12, pp. 6851-6854.

5. Shechao Feng & Patrick A. Lee, Mesoscopic Conductors and Correlations in Laser Speckle Patterns, Science 251 (9 Feb. 1991), pp. 633-639.

6. Alexander Volokh & Shechao Charles Feng, How Race Adds Up for UCLA Entry, L.A. Times (18 July 1995), partly reprinted in Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 9 (Autumn 1995), p. 94.

And just today I accidentally discovered an even shorter chain, again going through economists -- through my adviser Shleifer and my former economics professors Oliver Hart and Eric Maskin -- which gives me an Erdős number of 5!

1. Paul Erdős, Peter Fishburn & Zoltán Füredi, Midpoints of diagonals of convex n-gons, SIAM J. Discrete Math. 4 (1991), no. 3, pp. 329-341

2. Peter C. Fishburn, William V. Gehrlein & Eric Maskin, A progress report on Kelly's majority conjectures, Econom. Lett. 2 (1979), no. 4, pp. 313-314.

3. Sanford J. Grossman, Oliver D. Hart & Eric S. Maskin, Unemployment with Observable Aggregate Shocks, J. Polit. Econ. 91 (1983), no. 6, pp. 907-928.

4. Oliver Hart, Andrei Shleifer & Robert W. Vishny, The Proper Scope of Government: Theory and an Application to Prisons, Q.J. Econ. 112 (1997), no. 4, pp. 1127-1161.

5. Juan Carlos Botero, Rafael La Porta, Florencio López-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer & Alexander Volokh, Judicial Reform, World Bank Research Observer 18 (2003), no. 1, pp. 61-88.

I know what you're thinking: What's Eugene's Erdős number? If you consider the blog to be a co-authored work, then Eugene could be a 6. On the other hand, if you consider the blog to be a journal where each post is a separate article -- so Eugene and I haven't co-authored anything -- then Eugene might be a 7, because I've co-authored with Judge Kozinski (The Appeal, 103 Mich. L. Rev. 1391 (2005)), and so has Eugene (Lawsuit, Shmawsuit, 103 Yale L.J. 463 (1993)). Or Eugene's number might be lower through his co-authorship with, say, Larry Lessig.