Six Degrees of Separation

Some of the younger generation, who tell me they 'hate history,' might be surprised to learn that this theory was first proposed in 1929, by a Hungarian writer in a short story called "Chains." Then in the 1950's a couple of guys from MIT and IBM set out to prove the theory mathematically.

Stanley Milgram devised a new way to test the theory in 1967, which he called "the small-world problem." Milgram's findings were published in Psychology Today and inspired the phrase "six degrees of separation." A play, movie and one of the "Ten Best Web Sites of 1996" have followed.

In 2001, Duncan Watts, a professor at Columbia University, recreated Milgrams experiment on the Internet. Watts' research, and the advent of the computer age, has opened up new areas of inquiry related to six degrees of separation in diverse areas of network theory such as as power grid analysis, disease transmission, graph theory, corporate communication, and computer circuitry.

Is this a bunch of mumbo-jumbo? How did you say you found this blog?