What’s your Jordan3 number?

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.