Kevin Bacon Number - or degrees of separation in Hollywood.

The Kevin Bacon number has become a famous way to measure the linkage between actors and other performers, in Hollywood. It is based on the idea that there are "six degrees of separation" between any two people on Earth. This label actually arose in a play title by John Guare, and not, as commonly supposed, in an academic thesis.

The notion that we are closely interconnected in a social network, only separated by a few individuals, was popularized by the social experiments of Stanley Milgram. He was not, however, the original conceiver of this understanding, though he is often credited with it. Michael Gurevich and Manfred Kochen, both did pioneering work in this area, prior to Stanley Milgram.

The "six degrees of separation" refer to the idea that everyone is connected through the people they know, to anyone they don't know, through their friends' friends. Thus if someone is your friend, that is one degree of separation; if they are the friend of a friend, that is two degrees of separation; the friend of a friend of a friend, would be three degrees of separation and so on.

Around 1994, an idea, "Six degrees of Kevin Bacon" began to float around. The concept was simple: how many degrees of separation were there between Kevin Bacon and any other actor? It became a party trick for its inventors Craig Fass , Brian Turtle and Mike Ginelli who were all students at Albright College at the time. They would challenge people to throw the names of actors at them, then they would connect them to Kevin Bacon.

The Kevin Bacon number is a very simple way to measure the connectedness of an actor, in Hollywood. For instance, Tom Cruise has a Kevin Bacon number of 1. (This is because they both worked together in A Few Good Men in 1992); Rachel Weisz, who is successful, but not so successful as Tom Cruise, has a Kevin Bacon number of 2. (This is because she appeared in Confidence in 2003 with Andy Garcia, who then appeared in The Air I Breathe (2007) with Kevin Bacon). Incidentally, Laurence Olivier, the famed stage actor, who also worked in film, also has a Kevin Bacon number of 2. (This is because he appeared in Dracula (1979) with Frank Langella who went on to appear in Frost/Nixon with Kevin Bacon in 2008).

Now what really surprised me is to learn that both Ainan Celeste Cawley and myself have a Kevin Bacon number of 3. This is only in the expanded version of the Kevin Bacon number that includes documentaries and TV shows as well as films. If only films were allowed, Ainan would have a Bacon number of infinity because he has never been in a feature film. Ainan (and my) Kevin Bacon number of 3 arises because we were both in a documentary called The World's Cleverest Child and Me on Channel 4 with Mark Dolan, the presenter. Mark Dolan did a show called The 50 Greatest Comedy Films in 2006 in which Tony Curtis appeared. Tony Curtis then went on to appear in the Graham Norton Show 2007 with Kevin Bacon.

So there you are. The Kevin Bacon number just goes to show how small the worlds of tv and film are. Furthermore, even though neither myself nor my son have ever met Kevin Bacon, we are pretty close in the film world, being only three steps away. How odd.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to:http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

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