This Day In History: Kevin Bacon was born on this day in 1958. Bacon has become associated with the concept of interconnectedness popularized by the game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon". This game comes from the idea that any two people on Earth are six or fewer acquaintance links apart.
Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy in a short story called “Chains” first proposed the theory of six degrees in 1929. Karinthy’s belief was that we are all connected to each other by a string of friends, and that string was made up of six or less people.
A 2009 Facebook application called Six Degrees put the average 5.73, with 12 being the maximum. The LinkedIn professional networking site operates the degree of separation one is away from a person with which he or she wishes to communicate. Users on Twitter can follow other users creating a network. According to a study of 5.2 billion such relationships by social media monitoring firm Sysomos, the average distance on Twitter is 4.67. On average, about 50% of people on Twitter are only four steps away from each other, while nearly everyone is five steps or less away.
There is also a Six Degrees of Francis Bacon website which maps out the social connections between British historical figures from the 16th through 18th centuries.
The game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" was invented as a play on the concept: the goal is to link any actor to Kevin Bacon through no more than six connections, where two actors are connected if they have appeared in a movie or commercial together. It was created by three students at Albright College in Pennsylvania, who came up with the concept while watching Footloose. On September 13, 2012, Google made it possible to search for any given actor's "Bacon Number" through their search engine. The Bacon number of an actor is the number of degrees of separation he or she has from Bacon, as defined by the game. This is an application of the Erdos number concept to the Hollywood movie industry. The higher the Bacon number, the greater the separation from Kevin Bacon the actor is.
Kevin Bacon himself has a Bacon number of 0.
Those actors who have worked directly with Kevin Bacon have a Bacon number of 1.
If the lowest Bacon number of any actor with whom X has appeared in any movie is N, X's Bacon number is N+1.
For example, Elvis Presley was in Change of Habit (1969) with Ed Asner, Ed Asner was in JFK (1991) with Kevin Bacon. Therefore, Asner has a Bacon number of 1, and Presley (who never appeared in a film with Bacon) has a Bacon number of 2.
I am going to play that game in my own way with something else that happened on this day in history. (1) Kevin Bacon was in the movie Sleepers with Robert De Niro. (2) De Niro starred in a 1994 Frankenstein movie. (3) Frankenstein was written by Mary Shelley. (4) Mary Shelley was married to Percy Bysshe Shelley. (5) Percy Bysshe Shelley died on this day in 1822. There...I actually did in less than 6.
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