11th Graders: The Six Degrees of Separation is the theory that everyone is connected to everyone else through a chain that has no more than six links. In theory it states that I am no more than five people away from the Queen of England or five different people away from Hi Hi Puffy Ami Yumi. The theory was proposed in 1929 by Frigyes Karinthy, a Hungarian writer, in a short story called "Chains."

In the 50's, Ithiel de Sola Pool (MIT) and Manfred Kochen (IBM) set out to prove the theory mathematically. After twenty years they were unable to solve the problem to their own satisfaction. In 1967, American sociologist Stanley Milgram devised a new way to test the theory, which he called "the small-world problem." He randomly selected people in the mid-West to send packages to a stranger located in Massachusetts. The senders knew the recipient's name, occupation, and general location. They were instructed to send the package to a person they knew on a first-name basis, who they thought was the most likely to know the target personally. That person would do the same, and so on, until the package was personally delivered to its target recipient.

Amazingly, it took only five to seven intermediaries to get each package delivered (with six as the average). Milgram's findings were published in Psychology Today and inspired the phrase "six degrees of separation." Playwright John Guare popularized the phrase when he chose it as the title for his 1990 play of the same name, later to become a film with Will Smith.


This was followed by a website that parodied the idea and stated that no one in the world had more than six degrees of separation from actor Kevin Bacon (Apollo 13, Footloose). Why? I don't know. Here's the link to try it out. It was a student project at the University of Virginia.

In 2001, Duncan Watts, a professor at Columbia University, recreated Milgram's experiment on the Internet. Watts used an e-mail message as the "package" that needed to be delivered, and surprisingly, after reviewing the data collected by 48,000 senders and 19 targets (in 157 countries), Watts found that the average number of intermediaries (or links) was indeed, six.