Well, you need to appear in at least one movie to have a finite Bacon number, and write at least one scientific paper to have a finite Erdős number. And through costars/coauthors you need to have some connection to Bacon/Erdős.
The point of Bacon and Erdos numbers is that most actors and mathematicians have low numbers, not most people. I, for example, have never published an academic paper, which makes my Erdos number infinite. OTOH, if you count working as an paid extra, my Bacon number is 2 (what do you mean that doesn't count?).
BTW, a Bacon number of 10 is extremely high. IIRC, the highest finite Bacon number of anyone in the IMDB is 8.
My dad was a mathematician and legitimately had an Erdos number of 2 (Meaning someone he co-wrote a paper with had co-written a paper with Erdos)
When I was small, and even into high school, my dad helped me with my math homework. So I claim that I co-wrote many math related things with my dad, and so I have an Erdos number of three with a big fat asterisk.
I've appeared in one short film (with a cast of no one you've ever heard of), and I have a Bacon Number of 3. I would be surprised to if there are many contemporary people with a number higher than 4. The higher numbers tend to be people who were in older movies.
Thanks. That clarifies it. I got this confused with the seven degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon, wherein you count the number of people who know each other between you and the actor.
The fun part is that the Oracle of Bacon etc. has given us a great way to drive home the degrees of separation stuff not just for movie stars, but by making it fairly easy to find your own degrees of separation from Bacon.
E.g., I'm Norwegian, with no direct connections to the movie industry at all.
But if you include documentaries, Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former Norwegian prime minister and WHO director, has a Bacon-number of 3 (she was in some documentary that included Morgan Freeman)
As a child, I pretty much ran into her while on vacation. In high school, I interviewed a member of parliament that had regular dealings with her at various points in his career, and later I was politically involved and did debates against a later minister in a Labour party government, etc. I can find a number of other things connecting me to her.
Depending on how strict you want to be, I can "trace" back to Kevin Bacon either directly (tenuous) or about half a dozen people that both she and I had dealings with, in the latter case with 4 people separating me and Kevin Bacon.
Alternatively, I can find a link to Kevin Bacon via Mao Zedong: I used to know a guy that met Mao on a trade union trip to China in the 50's. Mao obviously met Nixon, and Nixon and the Clintons know each other, and Hillary Clinton was on Entertainment Tonight with Kevin Bacon at one point. Alternatively Nixon mas in a TV special with Robert Wagner, who was in Wild Things...
I could probably find dozens more paths to someone in the IMDB data.
Most people can probably "connect the dots" via people they can name in their social circuit to someone in the IMDB dataset in at most 2-3 steps, and actually find a specific path to Bacon...
Quite likely you can find several weird paths. Find anyone who has ever served as a member of congress or parliament in your respective country, for example, and you have at least an indirect path to a head of state, which gives you a path to any of a large number of high profile heads of state that have IMDB credits...
