William Tozier, who will be a graduate student in Operations Research
at Ann Arbor, has auctioned his research services on ebay.
The winner of the auction Ian Grove-Stephensen, will get 40 hours of Mr Tozier's services. Any publication that results will be a jointly authored paper.
Since Mr Tozier has an Erdos number of 4, Mr Grove-Stephensen will be then
have an Erdos number of 5.
Paul Erdos, who died just a few years ago, was a fantastically prolific mathematician, with well over 1000 publications, most of them joint.
The Erdos number is a crude measure of Paul Erdos' influence on mathematics.
An individual's Erdos number is the mininum number of coauthors needed to trace back to Erdos himself. So direct coauthors with Paul Erdos would have a
Erdos number of 1. Their coauthors would in turn have an Erdos number of 2, and so on.
The Chronicle of Higher Ed has an article about the auction. You can also see Mr Tozier's
blog .