CHAPTER 2
Fireflies, Snowy Tree Crickets, and the New Science of Networks
I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet.
—JOHN GUARE, Six Degrees of Separation
When Steven Strogatz arrived at Cornell University in 1994, he was already an accomplished mathematician. A former Marshall Scholar, he wrote the standard introductory textbook on chaos theory, won a prestigious award from the National Science Foundation, and was even awarded MIT’s highest teaching prize. He also had an unusual penchant for plucking interesting mathematical problems from everyday life. When he was a student at Princeton, he wrote a paper on the mathematics of ...
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