Chapter 4.1, Problem 59E

Discuss specific examples of ways that connectivity, as we discussed in Math in Your Life on page 151, has influenced things such as the way we conduct business, national and international affairs, and society in general.

It’s a Small World After All

The term “six degrees of separation,” first mentioned in a 1929 novel by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy, states that any two people on Earth are connected by a chain of no more than six associations.*

*Perhaps you have played the trivia game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.”

The sociologist Stanley Milgram tested this theory, called “the small-world problem,” by randomly selecting people in the Midwest to send packages to a stranger in Massachusetts. They were to send the package to a person they knew who they thought was most likely to know the target. Then that person would do the same, and so on, until the package was delivered. Milgram found that, on the average, the package was delivered after passing through the hands of five to seven people. In similar experiments, other researchers have found that the average length of a path of e-mails between a random sender and receiver was six. While discussing this with my wife, we realized that because of my appearance on a national television amateur show in my teens, my degree of separation with the Beatles is three and as a result of a graduate course that she took, her degree of separation from Mother Theresa of Calcutta is two. So what does this have to do with you? In your activities at school —fraternities, clubs, musical organizations, and sports teams—you are creating links in these personal chains that you may be able to use in later life to your benefit. In fact, companies like LinkedIn develop software that will provide you with chains of contacts that can help you in the corporate world. On the flip side, connectivity can sometimes work against you. Prospective employers are also only a few degrees of separation away from you and can use popular social media such as Facebook to check you out before inviting you for an interview.