ok I will play Lance Armstrong used frequent the bike shop I managed years ago when he was a kid. Plus my brother went to high school with Boz Scaggs. So I guess that gives me a bacon number of something. Sorry I am not sure how to get there from here in terms of historic figures.
Apparently they’re siblings. I know, surprised me too. There must have been some awkward moments over family get-togethers in the thirties.
OK, this thread has died it’s natural death, and I even waited to see if it would “zombify” on it’s own. Nope. So, my not winning “winning-the-thread” connection has to be revealed [and bumped. that’s what “taking account for your worthless boasts” requires], wimpy though it is.
My “thread winning” “thread-starting” idea turned out to be not at all thread-winning. Nevertheless, I did say at the beginning that I would hold back on my 6 degree, rather than winning the thread. Instead, I lose the thread, but I am still compelled to tell the story, so here it is:
I was a member of a fan club, one of who’s founding members was a German immigrant. Turns out she is the daughter of the XO of the ship “Prinz Eugen”, during the “Bismark” affair.
Given my connection to her, you just go up the military “chain-of-command” for that, and Hitler comes out to be the 6th degree.
Given that in my thread, here, people were legitimately claiming “Hitler” numbers of 4, I lose my own thread.
I hereby admit that my claim was wimpy, and I started a thread I thought I could win, but got totally trashed at, by the other people who responded. You all win. I lose.
I also call Godwin’s rule on my thread…
If we limit ourselves to “people who knew people well enough that they would recognize them” as opposed to “people who met someone once”, I’m 2 away from:
-Albert Einstein
-Edward Teller, Alonzo Church, Paul Erdos, and probably just about every other leading figure in math/logic from the time. Likely Werner Von Braun and a bunch of his cohort. (This is my grandfather. He was involved in rocketry and cryptography during WWII, and had a generally long career in mathematics and logic.)
Independently of that, I have close relatives who are or were:
-A white house correspondent
-A very influential political scientist
-Directory of Astronomy at JPL
-Editor of an economics journal
-Department secretary at the econ department at Stanford
Between them, that puts me 2 degrees away from Clinton, Obama, and an incredible number of nobel prize laureates, etc.
Finally, I used to be on a first name basis with Trip Hawkins (founder of EA) who worked at Apple in the way early days, and that presumably puts me at 2 for a wide variety of people in the tech industry.
Basically, everyone I know is more interesting than me 
A close friend of mine was a fellow graduate student at Princeton with John Nash who has, of course, met the King of Sweden. Another good friend was friend of Vaira Freiberga who was, for eight years, president of Latvia. Finally, FWIW, I met Paul Erdos a number of times and have an Erdos number of 2. Oh, I had a former colleague, long since deceased who knew Einstein personally.
I have a Prince Charles Number of 3…a boyhood friend of mine has a cameo in the movie “Repo Men” starring Jude Law. Mr. Law is an ambassador of the Prince of Wales’ Children and the Arts Foundation, so I presume he is more than familiar with the Prince of Wales.