The Six Degrees of Separation and Kevin Bacon

Six degrees of separation is the theory that any person can be connected to any other person through other people, with there being no more than five intermediaries between the two people. But the prolific actor Kevin Bacon somehow became forever connected with this theory, and here’s how it happened.

Six degrees of separation was first proposed by a Hungarian writer named Frigyes Karinthy in 1929 in a short story he wrote called Chains. In the story, a group plays a game trying to connect any person in the world to themselves by a link of only five others.

The theory was attempted to be proven mathematically in the 1950s by a research mathematician at IBM name Manfred Kochen and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology named Ithiel de Sola Pool. Though they were able to pose it in mathematical terms as a probability that people could be linked with high probability by at most two intermediaries, they were never able to solve the problem entirely.

Stanley Milgram, an American sociologist, tested the theory in 1967 by randomly selecting people in Kansas and Nebraska and had them send letters to a complete stranger in Boston. The senders were instructed to send the letters to a friend that might know the stranger by only knowing their name, occupation, and general location. The results were…