CentralNotice From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to navigation Jump to search "Six degrees" redirects here. It is not to be confused with Six degrees of freedom . For other uses, see Six degrees (disambiguation) . 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 " a friend of a friend " statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps. It was originally set out by Frigyes Karinthy in 1929 and popularized in an eponymous 1990 play written by John Guare . It is sometimes generalized to the average social distance being logarithmic in the size of the population. 1 Early conceptions 1.1 Shrinking world 1.2 Small world 1.3 Continued research: Small World Project 2 Research 2.1 Computer networks 2.2 An optimal algorithm to calculate degrees ...