Big batch of brief biographies
If you've spent any time on Wikipedia you've probably noticed its red links, links on certain words and phrases that don't actually go to another Wikipedia article. They're supposed to flag topics where Wikipedia should have an article but doesn't, and encourage people to start editing a new article on the topic. And often they do work that way. But they also tend to accumulate, especially on lists, and once they start doing that they tend to include many words and phrases on topics that aren't ready to be made into articles.
So anyway, for the last few weeks (in my copious spare time) I've been clearing out the red from List of people by Erdős number. It was never intended to be comprehensive; that's for the Erdős number project or maybe for the collaboration distance calculator built into MathSciNet. Rather, it's just supposed to list the subset of people who both have (or should have) Wikipedia articles and have a small Erdős number. The #3 section of the list has been clear of red for a long time, and now the #2 is. Most of what I did was to remove names, but along the way I found quite a few people who (it seemed to me) should so clearly have articles that I made new ones. They are:
Baruch Awerbuch, Robert G. Bland, Hans Bodlaender, Derek Corneil, Danny Dolev, Rod Downey, Amos Fiat, Benedict Freedman, Nancy Freedman, Uriel Frisch, László Fuchs, Curtis Greene, John P. Hayes, David Jerison, Lila Kari, Anna Karlin, Jon Lee, Darrell Long, Heikki Mannila, Paul G. Mezey, Cris Moore, Bernard Moret, George Nemhauser, Nathan Netanyahu, Noam Nisan, Alfred van der Poorten, John E. Savage, Boris M. Schein, Norman Schofield, Eli Shamir, Mike Steel, Ileana Streinu, Subhash Suri, Stevo Todorčević, Dorothea Wagner, Stan Wagon, Tandy Warnow, Dominic Welsh, Moti Yung, and William S. Zwicker.
(There are one or two in there that I didn't make but expanded someone else's recently created one. And at least one of the names above is not actually on the Erdős number list.)
You might notice that they're not all the same length or level of detail. That has very little to do with how important I think these people are, and very much to do with how easy I found it to write about them. Also, the fact that I removed a name doesn't imply that I think that person hasn't met the Wikipedia inclusion criteria for articles on academics: there were quite a few other names that I removed from the list for whom I would support the creation of an article, but wasn't ready to do it myself.