About

I’m Jonathan Whitmore — a physicist and data scientist interested in machine learning, causal inference, effective learning systems, and investing.

I studied physics at UC San Diego, and have maintained the UCSD Physics PhD Qualifying Exams archive since 2008.

I also make generative art — algorithmic explorations of motion, form, and color. On YouTube, I share educational videos, live coding sessions, and streams where I work through math homework.

This site is where I write about topics I find interesting, share projects and tools I’ve built, and occasionally misuse machine learning for fun and profit.

Erdős number

My Erdős number is at most 4, and every link in the chain is a refereed research publication:

  1. Paul Erdős → G. Jogesh Babu: Babu, Erdős & Ramachandra, “An asymptotic formula in additive number theory,” Acta Arithmetica 28 (1975/76) 405–412 — the first of their three joint papers.
  2. Babu → Eric D. Feigelson: Isobe, Feigelson, Akritas & Babu, “Linear regression in astronomy,” The Astrophysical Journal 364 (1990) 104.
  3. Feigelson → Joe P. Ninan: Kanodia et al., “A Hot Mars-sized Exoplanet Transiting an M Dwarf,” The Astronomical Journal 163 (2022) 3.
  4. Ninan → me: The Astropy Collaboration, “The Astropy Project: Building an Open-science Project and Status of the v2.0 Core Package,” The Astronomical Journal 156 (2018) 123.

Computed July 2026 by crawling my full two-hop co-authorship neighborhood (~66,000 people via OpenAlex) against the Erdős Number Project’s official lists. Erdős numbers are upper bounds — a shorter path may always turn up.

An argument for 3 exists: three of my Astropy co-authors wrote an Astro2020 white paper directly with Babu — “Algorithms and Statistical Models for Scientific Discovery in the Petabyte Era” — but a decadal-survey white paper isn’t refereed research, so I claim the conservative 4.

My favorite detail: the whole chain hinges on G. Jogesh Babu, who co-authored number theory with Erdős in the 1970s and then went on to co-found astrostatistics — the same person bridges pure mathematics and astronomy.