# Questions about Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-six-degrees-of-kevin-bacon/1020664>\
**Category:** The Game Room\
**Tags:** movies\
**Created:** [July 9, 2025, 4:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-six-degrees-of-kevin-bacon/1020664 "2025-07-09T16:16:06Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 3

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**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\
**Post date:** [July 12, 2025, 2:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-six-degrees-of-kevin-bacon/1020664/41 "2025-07-12T02:23:02Z")

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> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#):
>
> I had published in a refereed journal no longer exists

I meant to write “I had published in a refereed journal that no longer exists”.

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**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\
**Post date:** [July 12, 2025, 1:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-six-degrees-of-kevin-bacon/1020664/42 "2025-07-12T13:03:27Z")

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> [@Andy\_L](#):
>
> By the way, this [site](https://mathscinet.ams.org/mathscinet/freetools/collab-dist) will calculate Erdős numbers, though it seems a bit finicky

Yeah, it can’t seem to find the paper I published as an undergrad, and can’t even find the professor I was working with on it.

On the other hand, it does know the paper I published in grad school, and through it, gives me an Erdös number of 5, which is two less than the path I had previously known about (through Einstein).

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**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\
**Post date:** [July 12, 2025, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-six-degrees-of-kevin-bacon/1020664/43 "2025-07-12T15:01:08Z")

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One of my papers coauthored with my thesis advisor was in Simulation magazine ([https://journals.sagepub.com/overview-metric/SIM?](https://journals.sagepub.com/overview-metric/SIM?)) - but I don’t know how “important” that journal is (or was in the 1990s)

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**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\
**Post date:** [July 12, 2025, 4:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-six-degrees-of-kevin-bacon/1020664/44 "2025-07-12T16:29:23Z")

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The idea of degrees of separation is older than you might think. It apparently began in a 1929 short story by Frigyes Karinthy that was in the volume _Everything Is Different_. The story was titled “Chains” or “Chain-Links”. It’s not clear what the translated title of the story was because it was in Hungarian. The idea became popular in the early twentieth century because the world was becoming more globalized, with technology beginning to be developed that made it easier to contact or meet more people around the world:

> **[Six degrees of separation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation)**
>
> Six degrees of separation is the idea that all people are six or fewer social connections away from each other. As a result, a chain of "friend of a friend" statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps. It is also known as the six handshakes rule. Mathematically it means that a person shaking hands with 30 people, and then those 30 shaking hands with 30 other people, would after repeating this six times allow every person in a population as large as the United Sta Th...

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