Me and Mao and Meg 

Six degrees of separation is the idea that all living things and everything else in the world are six or fewer steps away from each other so that 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.

As a result of this hypothesis, Karinthy’s characters believed that any two individuals could be connected through at most five acquaintances. In his story, the characters create a game out of this notion. He wrote:   A fascinating game grew out of this discussion. One of us suggested performing the following experiment to prove that the population of the Earth is closer together now than they have ever been before. We should select any person from the 1.5 billion inhabitants of the Earth – anyone, anywhere at all. He bet us that, using no more than five individuals, one of whom is a personal acquaintance, he could contact the selected individual using nothing except the network of personal acquaintances. 

^** An early version involved former world Heavyweight boxing champion, John L. Sullivan, in which people would ask others to “shake the hand that shook the hand that shook the hand that shook the hand of ‘the great John L.'”^[

^{Bill’s “shake the hand” number with Mao Tse Tung is 2.}

^{Through Henry Kissinger, here just after the hand shake}

^{and Bill had had a handshake and a private conversation with Henry previously at his work}

^**   Mathematicians use an analogous notion of collaboration distance:^[43] two persons are linked if they are coauthors of an article. The collaboration distance with mathematician Paul Erdős is called the Erdős number. Erdős-Bacon numbers are further extensions of the same thinking.

Bill’s Erdős number is 3.

His Erdős-Bacon number is 6.

Movie:In the Cut            Movie: The Doors         Musical Play: El Dorado

^{And Cesar Chavez slept at Bill’s house}