In 1929, Hungarian writer, Frigyes Karinthy, first proposed the idea of six degrees of separation. In his short story 'chains'. The concept is based on the idea that the number of acquaintances grows exponentially with a number of links in the chain. Only a small number of links is required for the set of acquaintances to become the whole human population. By extension, the same term is often used to describe any other setting in which some form of link exists between individual entities in a large set.
His theory could not be proven or disproved by the simple fact that the technology was not available to test it. Fast forward 60 years and the evolution of the internet suddenly made the possibility of such a test seem more achievable.
