Bacon number
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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. This is an application of the Erdős number concept to the movie industry. The higher the Bacon number, the farther away from Kevin Bacon the actor is. The Bacon number (N) of any actor or actress X can be determined by the following set of rules:
- N is 0 if X is Kevin Bacon
- N is 1 plus 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
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.
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[edit] Notable Bacon numbers
- Very few actors have an undefined (or infinite) Bacon number, meaning that they cannot be linked to Bacon in any number of connections at all. As of December 2005, there were 9,692 actors in the IMDb who could not be linked to Kevin Bacon out of the total of 418,468 (approx. 2.3%).
- 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.
- Pope John Paul II (Bacon number: 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.
[edit] References in Pop-Culture
- In Strong Bad email number 167 ("the movies"), Strong Sad describes an actor in the film he is watching as having a "Bacon number of four."
[edit] Notes and references
- ^ The Center of the Hollywood Universe. Retrieved on 2006-07-15.
- ^ Who is the Center of the Hollywood Universe?. Retrieved on 2006-07-15.
[edit] 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.
