What’s your Jordan3 number?

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In the discussion of our post, Who has the lowest Erdos-Bacon-Epstein number? (the winner appears to be the mathematician Daniel Kleitman, my freshman-year academic adviser at MIT!), an anonymous commenter asks:

Is there anyone with a finite Michael Jordan^3 number (acting with Michael B Jordan, coauthoring with Michael I Jordan, playing on a team with Michael J Jordan)?

Good question! In the earlier post we discussed the rules for what counts in being in the acting network (IMDB and with a legitimate acting credit, not just being interviewed) and the academic authorship network (scholarly journals).

What about playing on a team? What would it take to be in the Michael J Jordan network? It would be too much to restrict to players on NBA teams. I’d allow any college team–but only varsity would count, not intramurals–but even that is pretty darn restrictive, so I think I’d count high school varsity as well.

I guess that lots of guys who’ve played high school varsity basketball have some connection to Jordan. You just need to have one player on your team who played in college, then one guy in that player’s college team who ever made it to the NBA, and then the graph must be complete from there. You could also get there through a different sport–for example, maybe you played football, and someone on your football team played basketball, and someone on their team played in college . . . or maybe someone on your football team played college football for awhile, and someone else on that team played basketball in high school, and someone else on his high school team played basketball in college, etc.

I’m guessing that somewhere there are people who (a) have acted in at least one movie, (b) have coauthored at least one academic article, and (c) played on a high school varsity team. And if you have all three of these attributes, you have a shot at having a finite Jordan3 number.

I can’t do it myself, as I’ve never acted and I’ve never played varsity sports.

I do have a cousin who’s acted on TV, though. This one show he was on has a huge list of famous names, which I guess can happen for a TV show that runs for lots of episodes, but, still, the very very list includes the still famous Billy Dee Williams, along with vaguely-familiar faces such as Dennis Christopher, Max Gail, Stuart Margolin, as well as G. Gordon Liddy (!) and someone named Tony W. Randall (no, not the Odd Couple guy) and someone named Robert Axelrod (no, not the political scientist). My cousin also was in the Olympics, and maybe someone on his team also played serious high school sports, so he could well have a finite Michael J Jordan number too. But his Michael I Jordan number is infinite, because he has no academic publications. Just to check this out, I searched for my cousin’s name on Google scholar, but all I found were two papers by his dad, but they’re single-authored so that wouldn’t work either. My uncle was no academic; he was a doctor who many years ago was enthusiastic about computer touchpad and voice-recognition technology and wrote a couple articles about a system he was trying to sell for computerized medical records.

And then there’s Michael J Jordan, who by definition has a Michael J Jordan number of 0, and he starred in Space Jam, and that movie has a long cast list, so I’m guessing his Michael B Jordan number is no more than 4. But no scholarly publications (no, this namesake doesn’t count), so his Michael I Jordan number is infinity.

I’m guessing, though, that there are some people out there with that finite Jordan3 number. Any ideas? Someone you know who’s acted in a legit production, coauthored a scholarly publication, and played on a high school sports team? No Jeffrey Epstein connection required.

29 thoughts on “What’s your Jordan3 number?”

  1. If documentaries count (most Bacon number calculators do count them, which I think is not really in the spirit of things), a good candidate for a finite Jordan3 number might be 1963 NBA Rookie of the Year and 3-time All Star Terry Dischinger:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Dischinger

    Played collegiate basketball at Purdue for three seasons and for three NBA teams across nine seasons.
    Appeared in at least two documentaries: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3200953/
    Has co-authored at least five academic publications: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Dischinger+T.&sort=date

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    • Unrelatedly, I clicked on your link and saw this blog post where a commenter quotes this peer review:

      1. Abstract: Abstract can be reduced, remove unwanted information.

      2. Introduction: The introduction, which is written in clear language, covers several relevant issues. Information are noteworthy, but not are correct supported by similar results from the supported by similar results from the specialty literature
      For this reason, I recommend that the authors try to use more sustainable methodologies, the interpretation of the results can be improved/ reformulated,
      To rewrite the abstract and conclusions, I also recommend the nuance of the introduction, the way of working is not very well explained, the procedure is tedious and unsustainable.

      3. General comments: Conclusion can be rewritten by removing unwanted information.

      Title can be reframed in a proper way. Recent references must be added.

      1. Insufficient Critical Evaluation of Evidence:

      The authors should critically evaluate the limitations of these studies and discuss potential differences that could affect the observed effects.

      2. Incomplete Discussion of Mechanisms.
      3. For this reason, I recommend that the authors try to use more sustainable methodologies, the interpretation of the results can be improved/ reformulated,

      That’s a review that is truly empty. But then this raises the question, why does it exist at all? If you’re asked to review a paper and you don’t want to do it, why not just decline? That would take even less effort than submitting an empty review, no?

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      • If I had to guess: facing difficulty acquiring peer reviews, some journals and publishers offer incentives for completing more peer reviews, like MDPI:

        https://www.mdpi.com/reviewers
        “For every manuscript reviewed, the reviewer may receive a discount voucher code entitling them to a reduction in the article processing charge (APC) of a future submission to any MDPI journal.”

        …or the jewel of Springer Nature’s portfolio, Cureus:

        https://www.cureus.com/honors
        “The Cureus rewards program for active authors, reviewers and readers.”
        “Perform actions to earn points and reach one of our four rewards tiers”
        “What Are the Rewards?…Preferred editing discount… Expedited PMC discount”

        People chasing after those APC discount vouchers will fill out a boilerplate review under the assumption that it would look suspicious if it was empty (or to meet a minimum length requirement).

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    • Urschel’s Michael J Jordan number has got to be finite, as one can make a connection through multisport athletes (e.g., Bo Jackson will take you from football to baseball and Danny Ainge will carry you over to basketball), and I expect there’s some shorter path that goes through high school and college multisport athletes.

      But I think that Urschel’s Michael B Jordan number is infinity because, according to IMDB, all his appearances are himself, no actual acting involved. Given Urschel’s celebrity, I have no doubt he could get a small acting gig if he wanted to and thus join the network, but he doesn’t seem to have done so yet.

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  3. Just to lock down one of the numbers: Michael J. Jordan made a cameo in _He Got Game_, which also starred Rosario Dawson, who played Wonder Woman in _Space Jam: A New Legacy_, in which…[drum roll]…Michael B. Jordan also made a cameo. So Michael J. Jordan’s Michael B. Jordan number is 2, and conversely.

    (Graph courtesy of The Oracle Of Bacon.)

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    • Steve:

      I think your calculation’s half right.

      You’re doing this through the network of movies, so Michael J Jordan’s Michael B Jordan number is 2.

      But to get Michael B Jordan’s Michael J Jordan’s number, you need to go through the network of sports teams. I looked up Michael B Jordan on wikipedia, and . . . it says he played basketball at the Newark Arts High School. So it seems possible that there’s a connection. On the other hand, it’s an arts high school so I don’t know if they ever had any players who were good enough to play for college teams . . . Further research is necessary, but his Michael J Jordan number has to be a lot more than 2.

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  4. Arguably, my Jordan^3 number is 3 – my Michael I. Jordan number is 3 and I was a high school classmate of Kelly Dukeshire and Ken Kirzinger – the former played against Charles Barkley and Karl Malone in the 1983 Universiade and the latter was a Hollywood stuntman/actor (Michael B Jordan number 2).

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    • K:

      To get your Jordan3 number, you need to add your Michael B Jordan acting number, your Michael I Jordan authorship number, and your Michael J Jordan sports team number. For this number to be finite, you need to have links in all three networks.

      For your Michael J Jordan number, did you play on a varsity team? Being a high school classmate is not enough–you need to have actually played on the team.

      For your Michael B Jordan number, did you act in a movie or TV show? Being a high school classmate is not enough–you need to have been an actor.

      Sorry . . . but nobody said it would be easy!

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  5. Tim Duncan and Neil deGrasse Tyson come surprisingly close, although I don’t think either one makes it in the end. Duncan is a co-author on a psychology paper, so he probably has a finite MIJ number (and a Roy Baumeister number of 2!). IMDB gives him an acting credit for playing himself in a Spider-Man thing with Robert Downey Jr, but it’s just a short 3-minute crossover NBA promo so I don’t think it counts. The Oracle of Bacon says no.

    Tyson has had cameos in movies and has MBJ number 2, and was a D1 athlete, but it was in wrestling and crew. Maybe one of his teammates was multi-sport in a way that gets us to basketball, but I doubt it.

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    • Daniel:

      Too bad that Duncan was only in that 3-minute video. He should get himself a cameo in a real movie. Maybe the Safdie brothers could put him in something.

      I looked up Neil deGrasse Tyson on Google Scholar and it was weird: two of the first three links were fake papers on the topic of switchgrass, posted at some site called researchgate.net. No connection to Tyson at all except that whoever did it threw his name on them. Really weird stuff. But, yeah, he has a bunch of legit coauthored scientific publications (search on Neal D. Tyson) so he surely has a finite Michael I Jordan number through some pathway or another.

      I’d guess that he has some sports-team link that could get us, in some circuitous way, to pro basketball. Maybe none of his wrestling teammates at Bronx Science lettered in any other sport, but I bet that at some point there have been guys on Harvard’s rowing team or wrestling team who played basketball or baseball or football in high school and had a teammate who played a major sport in college etc.

      So for now I think Tyson is our best shot.

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  6. I would suggest former NBA player and senator Bill Bradley as a plausible candidate. As he played in the NBA, a connection to MJJ should be easy. He has some publications in business journals, which may tie him to MIJ (eg https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C15&q=bill+Bradley&btnG=#d=gs_qabs&t=1766194686993&u=%23p%3DCB-ZPmURyVMJ). Lastly, IMDB credits him as appearing as a “basketball player” in an episode of the Cosby show, so he should be linkable to MBJ.

    That said, I am too lazy to try and chase down the actual fact of the matter here, though I enjoyed thinking about it.

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    • Basketballer:

      I think Bradley’s a win. The basketball connection to Michael J Jordan is obvious, the Cosby Show, which is fiction, so even though Bradley was only playing himself, I think this still counts as acting, and then it won’t take many steps to get to Michael B Jordan. Finally, you link to a Harvard Business School article by Bradley and two McKinsey executives (it seems that Bradley was working for McKinsey too at the time), one of whom, Lester P. Silverman, got a Ph.D. in economics in 1973 at CMU and specialized in the energy industry, so I’m pretty sure he was a coauthor of a paper, “Economic costs of energy-related environmental pollution,” with CMU professor Lester B. Lave, who coauthored with all sorts of bigshots such as Kenneth Arrow and Herbert Simon, and we can definitely get from there to Michael I Jordan.

      I don’t know what Bradley’s Jordan3 number is–maybe 10?–but he’s the only person we have yet with a finite value.

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  7. Kareem Abdul Jabbar has a good shot as well. Acted in a number of movies, including a Bruce Lee movie; I would also argue that his character in “Airplane” counts as acting (even though that character is partially Kareem himself, it is fictionalized since the real Kareem is not a commercial pilot). And he has coauthored with a bunch of people so there is possibly a finite link there.

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    • Dmitri:

      Unfortunately I don’t know that Kareem’s books count, first because they may be more of a case of ghostwritten than collaborations and second because they don’t seem close enough to scholarly publications.

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