Graphs and NetworksSocial

In 1929, when the Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy first proposed the idea of “six degrees of Separation”, there was no Internet or social media, but the world had already started to become more interconnected.

In 1967, Stanley Milgram conducted a first empirical experiment, where 296 participants living in Nebraska and Kansas were asked to deliver a letter to a particular person living in Boston, Massachusetts. They all had to choose a friend to send the letter to, who then picked another friend. At every step, the letter moved closer to Boston. Milgram found that there were, on average, only 5.2 intermediate friends – 5.2 degrees of separation.