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Paul Erdős was a Hungarian born mathematician famous for his brilliantly elegant proofs of seemingly unsolvable mathematical problems, especially in the area of numbers theory. He founded the field of discrete mathematics, the foundation of computer science, and was one of the most prolific mathematicians in history. He authored more than 1500 papers working, over the years, with roughly 458 collaborators. So highly regarded was he by other mathematicians that it became a badge of honor to have collaborated with him, an honor designated by claiming an “Erdős number” of 1, a system begun by Casper Goffman around 1965. To have an Erdős number of 2 meant you had collaborated with someone who had collaborated with Erdős, and so on.

Ronald Lewis Graham (born October 31, 1935) is a mathematician credited by the American Mathematical Society as being “one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years”. He has done important work in scheduling theory, computational geometry, Ramsey theory, and quasi-randomness.