Bacon number

The Bacon number of an actor or actress is the number of degrees of separation (see Six degrees of separation) they have from actor Kevin Bacon, as defined by the game known as Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. The higher the Bacon number, the farther away from Kevin Bacon the actor is. The Bacon number of any actor or actress X can be determined by the following set of rules:

• 0 if X is Kevin Bacon
• 1 + the lowest Bacon number of all of the actors/actresses who have appeared in a movie with X
• infinite/undefined if X cannot be connected to Kevin Bacon at all

This is an application of the Erdős number concept to the movie industry. There is also the related concept of Erdős-Bacon number, which is simply the sum of a person's Erdős number and Bacon number.

Notably, Bacon is not the most linkable actor. According to the Oracle of Bacon site, that honour goes to Rod Steiger. The average Steiger number in the acting community is 2.679.^[1] By contrast, the average Bacon number is 2.946.^[2] The least linkable actor in Hollywood has an average number of 9.2. However, the Oracle of Bacon did not release his/her name.

Notable Bacon numbers

• Fred Ott (Bacon number: infinite/undefined), who was the only actor in the only two films he was ever in. [1]

• Robert De Niro (Bacon number: 1)
  • Robert De Niro was in Sleepers (1996) with Kevin Bacon.

• Ronald Reagan (Bacon number: 2)
  • Ronald Reagan was in The Young Doctors (1961) with Eddie Albert.
  • Eddie Albert was in The Big Picture (1989) with Kevin Bacon.

• Adolf Hitler (3)
  • Adolf Hitler was in Der Ewige Jude (1940) with Curt Bois.
  • Curt Bois was in The Great Sinner (1949) with Kenneth Tobey.
  • Kenneth Tobey was in Hero at Large (1980) with Kevin Bacon.

• Pope John Paul II (3)
  • Pope John Paul II was in Padre Pio — Tra cielo e terra (2000) with Giovanni Lombardo Radice.
  • Giovanni Lombardo Radice was in The Omen (2006) with Vee Vimolmal
  • Vee Vimolmal was in Where the Truth Lies (2005) with Kevin Bacon

• Paul Erdős, who is the centre of a similar network for mathematicians, was believed to have a Bacon number of 4, due to his appearance as himself in the 1993 film N Is a Number: A Portrait of Paul Erdős, but this is now believed to be in error due to a conflation of similarly named persons. Relaxing the definition of Bacon number to include crew, however, does yield a Bacon number of 3 for Erdős:
  • Paul Erdős was in N is a Number which had original music by Mark Adler.
  • Mark Adler provided music for The Rat Pack which co-starred Joe Mantegna.
  • Joe Mantegna was in Queens Logic with Kevin Bacon.

External links

• The Oracle of Bacon at the University of Virginia computes the Bacon number of any actor or actress from IMDb data
• Cinema FreeNet Movie Connector finds links between stars, but can also use directors and producers.

Notes and references

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