6 degrees of Wilt

I often wish that facebook was more like AIM, in that when a new version of facebook comes out I can check out the new features and go back to version 4.3. I liked the old facebook. Just linked pages. No friend statuses, photo albums, news feeds or friend details (and no fucking gifts!). I liked my facebook when it looked like this:



I remember one of my favorite features that they removed was the "You
Know Karen Through..." that gave you some connection to people you didn't know. It would list one of your friends who knows one of their friends who knows them. I can imagine when that would be useful.

Girl: Hey your Brad right?
Guy: Yeah.
Girl: Your friends with Jess right?
Guy: Yeah, how do you know Jess?
Girl: I don't, but she knows my friend Tom.
Guy: Ohh, so we have no common friends.
Girl: Yeah...

Facebook finally realize that listing more that 2 degrees of separation was futile, and that listing mutual friends was probably more relevant. But I used to enjoy trying to find people on my network that were more than 3 degrees of separation away from me. I never could find any current students that I didn't know through at least 2 people.

I was thinking about this yesterday as I was driving on the Ohio Turnpike, and it got me thinking about the whole theory of 6 degrees of separation. I started thinking about who was the most pivotal node in the network. The person that most people would use to connect to other people. This person would have to have met lots of people in lots of different places and they would have to have been well known enough so that people would remember their encounter. The answer came to me immediately. Wilt Chamberlain had more connections than anyone else, ever.

Think about this, the average person only ever meets a few thousand people in their lifetimes. Even people who are very social in college rarely leave with more than 1000 facebook friends. And even then they probably don't even know all of them. But Wilt Chamberlain had to have meet at least an order of magnitude more than the average person. He had sex with 20,000 women alone. Imagine what that means, at the time of his death there were about 250 million people in the US. 125 million women. And he had sex with 20,000 of them. That mean that 1 in 6250 women in the US had sex with The Big Dipper. That's just people he railed. He probably met people he didn't rail. If you do the math, probably 1 in a few thousand people met him, which is about how many people the average American knows. I mean you could guess that most Americans were within 2 degrees of separation of him at his time of his death. Can anyone think of anyone who could equal this guy in terms of sheer popularity. So lets see, Wilt Chamberlain was in Conan the Barbarian with Arnold Schwarzenegger who was in Twins with Danny DeVito who was in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Jack Nicholson with who was in A Few Good Men with Kevin Bacon! So there.