Six degrees of separation
theory of inter-connectedness of all people
Six degrees of separation is the idea that all people are six or fewer social connections away from each other. As a result, a chain of "friend of a friend" statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps. It is also known as the six handshakes rule. Mathematically it means that a person shaking hands with 30 people, and then those 30 shaking hands with 30 other people, would after repeating this six times allow every person in a population as large as the United States to have shaken hands (seven times for the whole world).
The concept was originally set out in a 1929 short story by Frigyes Karinthy, in which a group of people play a game of trying to connect any person in the world to themselves by a chain of five others. It was popularized in John Guare's 1990 play Six Degrees of Separation. The idea is sometimes generalized to the average social distance being logarithmic in the size of the population.
Early conceptions
Shrinking world
Theories on optimal design of cities, city traffic flows, neighborhoods, and demographics were in vogue after World War I. These conjectures were expanded in 1929 by Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy, who published a volume of short stories titled Everything Is Different. One of these pieces was titled Chains or Chain-Links. The story investigated—in abstract, conceptual, and fictional terms—many of the problems that captivated future generations of mathematicians, sociologists, and physicists within the field of network theory.
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This entry incorporates text from “Six degrees of separation” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.