I meant to write “I had published in a refereed journal that no longer exists”.
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).
One of my papers coauthored with my thesis advisor was in Simulation magazine (https://journals.sagepub.com/overview-metric/SIM?) - but I don’t know how “important” that journal is (or was in the 1990s)
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: