The Erdős number, rebuilt for the deep-learning era. Paul Erdős wrote 1,500+ papers; mathematicians measure their distance to him in co-authorship hops. We do the same with Geoffrey E. Hinton as the origin.
Co-author a paper with Hinton and your number is 1; co-author with a 1 and yours is 2 — your Hinton number is the length of the shortest co-authorship path from you back to Hinton.
Everything comes from the full dblp.org dump (CC0 1.0) — the computer-science bibliography. We rebuild the co-author graph and re-run the computation monthly; the verified date on every badge is that build date. Nothing is computed live: your lookup reads a precomputed table.
Of the 4.3M authors in DBLP, 0% have a finite path to Hinton. Each square below is ~21,000.0 authors — the gray ones have published, but never within reach of the giant connected component.
Only 224 people ever co-authored a paper directly with Hinton — the top 0.006% of connected authors. Being a 1 is rarer, among CS authors, than being struck by lightning in your lifetime.
The Hinton number is measured in a unit invented for Paul Erdős — and Erdős himself has a Hinton number of 3. Legends who never touched deep learning have one too; publish anywhere near the field's ancestry and the graph finds you.
The most common distance is 4 — 55% of connected authors sit there, and 96% land between 3 and 5. Distances above 7 are vanishingly rare.
Mean distance to the center of each famous small world. The average Hinton number beats the average Erdős number — deep learning collaborates harder.
Hop count treats a one-off workshop paper the same as a decade of collaboration. Link strength doesn't. We use the standard co-authorship tie strength from network science — Newman's collaboration weight (M. E. J. Newman, 2001) — where each shared paper adds 1 / (co-authors − 1) to an edge: many small-team papers make a strong edge; one 25-author paper adds almost nothing.
We find your strongest route to Hinton (it may take more hops than the shortest one) and report where that strength ranks, as a percentile. A long chain of heavy collaborations can outrank a short chain of thin ones. The ten-box meter on your badge is that percentile in 10-point steps:
Why is my number ∞? You have no path to Hinton in DBLP yet — usually meaning no indexed publication. Your first paper is your ticket in.
I can't find myself / that isn't me. Names collide; pick yourself by the paper titles shown in search. Author identity follows DBLP's disambiguation.
Non-CS papers? Not yet — DBLP covers computer science. Broader sources are on the roadmap.