Respectable Number Games

Wikipedia says of Dr. John Dee that his "ultimate goal was to help bring forth a unified world religion through the healing of the breach of the Catholic and Protestant churches and the recapture of the pure theology of the ancients." For some reason this made me think of that silly trend of putting mission statements on top of curricula vitae, especially since it's now become somewhat of a forced field. What was said of Dr. Dee makes a lot of sense when you consider his background of overlapping the reigns of Queens Anne (Catholic) and Elizabeth (Protestant), and the fact that he's even suspected of being a spy for Elizabeth.

The article on Dee is a featured one, meaning it's one of the highest quality on Wikipedia, which is true but its level of detail actually makes me want more—unda impellitur unda. For example, it says of The Hieroglyphic Monad that "the loss of the secret oral tradition of Dee's milieu makes the work difficult to interpret today", but it doesn't give a direct source for that assertion. Is it something that's been derived from multiple works, or did the author find it in a single book on Dee? Or was the author coming to that conclusion themselves based on a wider knowledge of Dee? But footnoting to that extent would be very messy, and there's a limit to just how detailed you can be.

One thing that isn't mentioned in the article is the Book of Soyga, that Dee tried in vain to translate but was unable to, and which remained lost for a while until recently found in the Bodleian and British Libraries (under the alternative title "Aldaraia") and translated by Jim Reeds of the Digital Technology Center. Reeds mentions that he has a "respectable but not stellar Erdos number", which got me calculating my own Erdős number, and wondering about other social connection games such as the handshake number, of which I have very low values for famous jazz musicians thanks to William Loughborough. I can be codepicted with Homer Simpson in just five pictures.