A basic Buddhist insight is that everything is connected, nothing exists in isolation.  The technical term is “emptiness” and the Heart Sutra expresses it as “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” One pop culture expression of this insight is the Six Degrees of Separation idea. 

This is the idea that all people are six or fewer social connections away from each other. As early as 1967, Stanley Milgram tested this idea in his small world experiment, where the goal was to send a letter from a random person in Kansas to a random person in Boston via a chain of friends. The letters on average reached their destinations after five and half people. Incidentally Milgram never used the term “six degrees of separation”. This was popularized in a 1990 play Six Degrees of Separation and a 1993 film of the same name starring Stockard Channing, Will Smith, Donald Sutherland and Ian McKellan among others.

The concept has been popularized in a number of offline and online games. This Wikipedia article gives a nice overview of these, as well as more serious attempts to estimate average degrees of separation in various contexts. Wikipedia itself has become the focus of another popular six degrees of freedom game, which my sons have told me about playing, in which the player attempts to find the shortest link path between any two given Wikipedia articles.

I’ll focus below on the Erdös number (mathematicians), the Bacon number (actors), various extensions of the Bacon number, plus a couple I’ve made up myself because I score well on them (what better reason could there be). Disclaimer: none of these numbers say anything about a person’s career success, or social influence, they just shine a light on the wild and wacky ways that we can be connected and that connections are often closer than we would think.