I've recently worked on finding my personal Erdös Number. (See also Paul Erdos: An Infinity of Problems and Groups, Graphs, and Paul Erdos, columns written by Ivars Peterson.)

My Erdös Number (or Erdos Number) is no greater than 5, but I'll make a case for 4.

Here is the path for claiming 5:

1. Sarvadaman D. Chowla and Paul Erdos have 3 joint papers, the first in 1950, with their connection documented in http://www.oakland.edu/~grossman/Erdos0.
   This gives Chowla an Erdös Number of 1.
   I still need to determine the titles, etc., of these papers.

2. Sarvadaman D. Chowla and John R. Cowles with their connection documented in http://www.oakland.edu/~grossman/Erdos1.
   This gives Cowles an Erdös Number of 2.
   I still need to determine the title, etc., of this paper.

3. John H. Rowland and John R. Cowles, "Small sample algorithms for the identification of polynomials", Journal of the ACM, 33(4):822-829, October 1986.
   This gives Rowland an Erdös Number of 3.

4. John H. Rowland and Leslie E. Shader, "On the selection of test data for vector-valued recursive subroutines", SIAM Journal on Computing, 12(3):526-538, August 1983.
   This gives Shader an Erdös Number of 4.

5. Michael L. Cook and Leslie E. Shader, "A Strategy for the Ramsey Game of 'Tritip'", Proceedings of the Tenth Southeastern Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory, and Computing, April 1979, pp 315-324.
   This gives me an Erdös Number of 5!

Here is the path for claiming 4:

1. Follow the first 3 steps above.

4. Michael L. Cook, "An Introduction to Quantitative Software Reliability Models and Software Cost Estimation with an Annotated Bibliography on Reliability, Software Cost Estimation, and Testing", International Business Machines, August 1985, 284 pp.
   This was written as part of my Masters in Computer Science work with Dr. John H. Rowland as my supervising professor.
   This gives me an Erdös Number of 4!

I was fortunate to be able to attend a lecture given by Paul Erdös himself. He visited the University of Wyoming, and gave an open lecture during some late afternoon during the week. I don't remember the date. Although I didn't follow most of the arguments, it was interesting to listen to Mr. Erdös talk about conjectures, proofs, etc. At the end of his lecture, he said something such as "The lecture is finished now", then sat down.

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