

Mathematics of the Small-World Phenomenon (from Networks, Crowds, and Markets) - kakooljay
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/networks-book-ch20.pdf

======
kakooljay
Includes a discussion of Stanley Milgram's famous experiment ["with a budget
of only $680, he set out to test the speculative idea that people are really
connected in the global friendship network by short chains of friends.. he
asked a collection of 296 randomly chosen 'starters' to try forwarding a
letter to a 'target' person, a stockbroker who lived in a suburb of Boston.."
& found that the MEDIAN length of successful paths was just six] and clarifies
a common misconception about it:

"It doesn’t establish a statement quite as bold as 'six degrees of separation
between us and everyone else on this planet' - the paths were just to a
single, fairly affluent target; many letters never got there [all but 64 in
fact]; and attempts to recreate the experiment have been problematic due to
lack of participation."

~~~
yannis
Full book (to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2010) at

<http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/>

