Natalie Portman: Menace 2 society or How to chat up Natalie Portman

Natalie Portman ruined one of my photos today.

A spot of rain decided to grace sunny old London today, so Shannon and I decided to visit the British Museum. The collection is quite impressive, as it should be for a large museum, but the highlight has to be the new addition by Norman Foster. Anyway, after wandering through the Egyptian collection for hours, I spotted a great potential photo. There was some fantastic light streaming through a window and spot lighting a huge Egyptian statue. There was a lot of people in the hall, and every one of 'em seemed intent on being in my photo. The crow cleared and I was about to take the picture when Shannon grabs my shoulder:

"She's here! The Portman!" She was really excited, her eyes were sticking out.

"Who? What?" I could not believe I had lost the shot, so I was not really paying attention for a few seconds.

"Natalie Portman is in the museum!" Shannon dragged me round the comer and sure enough, Natalie Portman is standing next to an exhibit case with a tall guy about the same age as her.

"Are you going to take a picture?" Shannon asked, practically squeaking with excitement. I thought about it for a second. A picture like that would have earned me the kind of money I really need right now, but for some reason I suddenly had an attack of the conscience. "No, she's just trying to have a nice normal Saturday, just like us. I'd rather just go and talk to her, but even then, what would I say?" I guess that was why really. I mean Natalie Portman must have so many people say the same thing to her every time they meet her. Nothing original came to mind, and I didn't want to just say something stupid like: "I Loved you in Star wars!" or something creepy like "Your head was really bald in V for Vendetta."

I was so vexed by the "Ultimate Question" (What does one say to Natalie Portman?) that I decided to do a little online sleuthing to see if I could find any really unique facts about La Portman. Like millions of people before me, I checked out her IMDB profile first, but nothing jumped out at me. From there it was your basic Google search, but that just throws up a bunch of scary cult-like worship sites. So I turned to good old Wikipedia, and I of course struck pay dirt. Not only did I find the most unique fact about Ms. Natalie so far, I found the coolest personal achievement metric ever: It turns out that Natalie Portman is one of the few people in the world to have a finite Erdős-Bacon number.

What is an Erdős-Bacon number you ask? Well the second part helps to explain the first part. The Bacon in Erdős-Bacon stands for Kevin Bacon, the Hollywood star who's career famously inspired the game "Six degrees of Kevin Bacon". The Erdős is for Paul Erdős, a Hungarian mathematician who is sort of the academic worlds answer to Mr. Bacon. Much like ones bacon number is calculated by figuring out how many actors it takes to link any other given actor to bacon through there involvement in films, Erdős numbers are derived from linking academics to Erdős via published scientific papers.

In order to qualify for an Erdős-Bacon number you must first have a Bacon number and an Erdős number, meaning you have both appeared in a film (giving you a Bacon number) and co-authored at least one academic paper (giving you an Erdős number). Natalie's Bacon number is 2 as both her and Kevin Bacon have worked with Matt Dillon. Portmans's Erdős number, a 7, is due to the fact that she co-authored two published research papers (under her real name, Natalie Hershlag) while she was a University student. Once you combine these numbers, you get a finite Erdős-Bacon number of 9.

Of course, what this all boils down to is that I now know what to say the next time I run in to Natalie Portman: "Ms. Hershlag, I loved your paper on Frontal lobe activation during object permanence."