From Muhammad Ali to Grandma Rose

When Duncan Watts was pursuing his Ph.D., his adviser was Steven Strogatz, who has written scientific papers with Rennie Mirollo, who was a teaching assistant for Steve Maurer, whose mother used to live down the hall from my Grandma Rose in a high-rise in Hackensack, New Jersey. Small world, right? Such coincidences crop up a lot. They feel so familiar that there's even a popular legend to explain them. According to cocktail-party lore, every pair of people on the planet--a randomly chosen Inuit and a Parisian, a Solomon Islander and a dude from Nebraska--are connected by a chain of at most 6 acquaintances. I personally, to drop only a few names, am 2 steps from Prince Charles and Stephen Hawking, 3 steps from Marilyn Monroe and King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, 4 steps from King Juan Carlos of Spain, and close friends with the brother of a childhood buddy ...