Why The World Is Much Smaller Than You Think
October 21, 2019Stay in the know with exclusive industry news, click here and subscribe to our eNewsletter today!
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Has this happened to you? You strike up a conversation with a complete stranger, only to discover that you share surprising connections. My own brush with this phenomenon took place recently at a conference in Canada.
I was sharing a table with two strangers—one from Israel, the other from Baltimore, Maryland—when the sitcom The Big Bang Theory came up in conversation. As it happened, the science adviser for the show is a good friend, and I never miss an opportunity to mention this. To my surprise, I was not the only one connected to the show.
The Israeli researcher was related to one of the main actors, while the Baltimore researcher worked with my friend’s graduate-school roommate. What a small world, our group agreed when we learned of these connections. We should not have been surprised.
As network scientists who study complex systems composed of many interconnected parts, we know that social networks connecting us through kinship and friendship are often small, in the sense that any two people within the network are connected by unexpectedly short chains made up of social links.