Steven J. Hageman
February, 1997

     Here is a small world story for you....  In 1994, while I was a postdoc at the University of Adelaide in South Australia, I lived in university postgraduate housing.  There I met another American, Mike from Iowa (myself originally from Missouri).  One evening, Mike and I were sitting in a pub in North Adelaide discussing life, the universe, etc., when it came out in the course of conversation that Mike had been a national park ranger in the Apostle Islands for a season.  The Apostles are a rather small group of islands located in southern Lake Superior, which are accessible only by boat.  Mike and I were pleased with the coincidence that I had also visited the Apostle Islands.  I had camped in a remote site on the far side of the main island with a group of about 20 friends (actually a honey moon party for a couple of friends).  For some reason, neither Mike or I could remember exactly when each of us had been to the Apostle Islands.  Then I remembered that it was during the time of the coup in the USSR (August 1991).  I told Mike that I knew this because one night on the island a park ranger had come into our camp by boat to check on us and had asked us if we had any news about the coup.  The ranger had a small radio and was receiving local news broadcasts, but did not know any details.  Our party had been isolated for several days, so the news of the events came as quite a surprise to us, and provided for an evening of speculation as to the world's future.  Three years later, in a pub on the other side of the world, Mike took a sip of his Tooey's Old, smiled and said, "That park ranger was me."
 
 

    Everyone can share a small world story of their own.  We have all met someone unexpected in an unlikely place.  The improbability of the event becomes almost magical.  It may be something as simple as encountering an acquaintance from home some place in a large city miles from home.  Other small-world stories are so complex and complicated that the mere telling of the story makes the coincidence seem incomprehensible.  The improbability of these events occurring makes the encounter become almost mystical.  The same is true when you meet someone for the first time and you find that you share a common friend, or have had a similar life experience as you (same fraternity or took the same vacation).  After all, "... what are the odds?"
    I have found, however, that virtually everyone has an "incomparable" small-world story.  This fact raises the question of, "Just how unlikely (or likely) are these events, really?".  Although odds and probabilities can not be applied directly,  I will argue that, not only are such encounters not that rare, but that in fact they are virtually inevitable.  The amazing event is not so much that small world stories happen at all, but that "near small world encounters" undoubtedly happen a rather frequently and most go unnoticed.  For example, it is quite possible that Mike and I could have known each other for a full year in South Australia and never have gotten around to talking about the Apostle Islands, for I am certain that we did not exhaust our topics for conversation.
 
 

    Growing up in a small, rural northwest Missouri town, my perspective of the world was all relative to a single reference point: Home.  The more I learned about the outside world through magazines, television and the movies, the bigger my perspective of the world became.  Every new place I learned about expanded my perceived size of the world.  I can remember clearly when I was eight years old and my family was on a short vacation.  We were shopping in a book store in St. Louis, Missouri (some 300 miles from reference point Home), when my father recognized a acquaintance of his from work, who also happened to be browsing in the same book store.  They made the obligatory "small world" joke and went on about their business.  This event, however, boggled my young mind.  What were the chances of our family, meeting another family, from the same small town, in the same bookstore, in a huge city, clear across the state?
    My second small world encounter came when I was twelve years old, on another family vacation.  We were staying in an old fashioned motel (single story stucco units with a grass courtyard and no pool) in Durango, Colorado.  My father started talking to a young man in the steel lawn chair next to him on the grassy courtyard and it turned out that this man lived in a small town near my cousin in Emporia, Kansas.  The man knew my cousin casually from their using the same live stock sales barn.  Again, my small mind whirled.  What were the chances, that this stranger passing through Colorado would know my cousin in Kansas?

    The following are a few more examples of first hand small world stories.

• My Scottish colleague, Robert Hamilton Bruce, with whom I shared an office in Adelaide, worked for years in an animal laboratory in Johannesburg, South Africa.  When they were in Johannesburg a close friend of his wife's in Johannesburg moved away, returning to the Netherlands, where she grew up.  Several months later Robert and his wife were in London on holiday, where they uncharacteristically went to see a first release movie at the theater (Jaws).  Minutes later her Dutch friend walked into the theater and sat next to them.  Each assumed the other was at home (South Africa and Netherlands, respectively).
• Debbie, a friend of mine from graduate school days at Urbana, spent two years working in Madrid, Spain.  Her sister from North Dakota visited her in Madrid and they spent one afternoon on a tour of a classic cathedral.  When they met their small group for the tour, their cousin and her husband were there waiting for the same tour.  Debbie's cousin lives in New Zealand and was on her honeymoon in Spain.  Neither knew the other was in Madrid.
• Patty, an American from St. Louis who I met in Adelaide, met a woman in her physiotherapy class in Adelaide.  Six months later Patty was touring in northern Scotland and unexpectedly met her Australian friend in a very small, remote stone church.
• When I was living in Adelaide, South Australia I took a trip to Cairns on the other side of the continent in far north Queensland (Great Barrier Reef area).  I took a tourist train 30 miles inland, up a mountain to a small touristic village in the rain forest.  I walked through the small town and went into a crowded restaurant for lunch.  I had to walk back through two rooms and onto the back porch to find a seat.  I sat in the only open table, which was next to a Canadian couple who I knew from my housing complex in Adelaide.  Neither of us knew the other had even planed a trip to Cairns.
• My friend Rob was driving from Illinois to Florida with his wife one summer.  On the interstate bypass around Atlanta they passed Dave, a friend of ours who was also driving to Florida.  They waved as they went by.
• One day in Adelaide I was walking down the sidewalk on campus when a woman passed the other direction.  I thought to myself, "My gosh that woman looked like Peg Rees".   Peg was my Optical Mineralogy teaching assistant at the University of Kansas some twelve years previous and whom I hadn't seen since.  Two days later I received our Departmental newsletter that said we should welcome our visiting scholar, Margaret Rees.
•  Add your own to the list.

    The reason that small world stories are so attractive is that the apparent odds of the event occurring are astronomical; approaching supernatural.  The fact that everyone has an 'unbelievable' small world story or two demonstrates that the odds are clearly not astronomical.  In order to resolve this paradox we must look at what the probability (odds) of an event occurring actually are.
    If, for example, the next time you are to get on an air plane, if you were to ask, "what are the odds that the person who has been assigned the seat next to me will be my 5th grade gym coach," the odds would indeed astronomical (though slightly higher if you were flying out of your hometown than Caracas).  However, if you were to ask, what are the odds that in the next several years I will cross paths with someone (anyone) unexpectedly, somewhere (anywhere), sometime (anytime), the probability becomes much, much greater.   This is the difference between the probability of single event happening or the probability of any one of many events happening.  The magic is that when one of the many possible events does occur, we perceive it as the odds of that single event occurring independent of all others.
    There are a number of reasons (factors) why people grossly underestimate the likelihood of having a chance encounter.  I will attempt to demonstrate the reasons why the actually probability of a chance encounter are actually much greater than people's general conceptions of the probability once the event happens.  I will do this by analyzing the characteristics of true "small world stories" of my own and of those told to me, first hand, by close friends.
 
 

    People, by in large, underestimate the total number of people that they know or have ever known over their lifetime.  When I put this in a form of a question to friends, a common reply is that their total number of acquaintances is in the hundreds or low thousands.  This may be an accurate figure for some one who has lived a sedentary life in a very small community, but for most people in the western world these days, I believe that the actual number of life-time acquaintances is in the high-tens to low-hundreds of thousands.
    Reflect on you own experiences.  Think of all of your past and present acquaintances.  Your close friends, family members and work associates are likely to come to mind first.  However, think of all of the people you ever knew at school, on sports teams, at social clubs, and all the jobs you ever worked.  Now, think of all the people who are friends of your friends and of your friend's family members who you may have met once.  Think of all of your parents friend's friends and your bothers' or sisters' friends.  How about the children of your parents' friends or the old girlfriends of your brother's friends?  Now include people you have never even associated with, but that you would recognize if placed in a position to do so, such a members of associated social clubs from nearby towns you met at district meetings, or semi-irregular customers at work.  This may also include the waitress at your favorite coffee shop to the teller at the mini-mart down the street (both today and if you would recognize the one from a decade ago).  Now include all the people you have ever met while traveling such as at conferences or conventions or on vacation.
    If you sum all of these people up over a life time, I believe you will find that the subset of the human race that would be in a position to recognize and know you in an unexpected chance encounter is much larger than you would expect.  The fact that you are not able to consciously compile this list at a single moment in time demonstrates that you have the potential to recall many more individual people than you realize.  This difference between your perceived subset of the human race you think you know (maybe 1,000-5,000 names if asked for an immediate accounting) and the real subset of the human race you know (likely 75,000 - 150,000), contributes significantly to the apparent astronomical odds of chance encounters resulting in small world stores.
 
 

    The astute fifth grade math student will note that proportional difference between perceived number of life time acquaintance and the real number of life time acquaintances is minimal when compared to the worlds population of ~6,000,000,000 people.  This is true, but, the total number of people that one individual is ever likely to come into contact with is much smaller.  There is only a subset of the world's population that we are physically ever likely to cross paths with (and the rest you will not).  For example, with the St. Louis bookstore story, you could be pretty sure that the vast majority of the population of China and India (2.0 billion people) were not going to be in St. Louis that afternoon.  If you consider that our family of four had a total acquaintance base of 200,000 and limited the subset of potential book shoppers to just U.S. citizens, then the odds that we would meet someone in the book shop we knew, the odds are down to around one in one thousand.  Another way to look at this is that if a person spent their entire life in the United States and conservatively knew 25,000 people over their life, they would have known 1 in every 10,000 Americans.
    Obviously our acquaintances are not randomly distributed (geographically) across the United States, nor are they equally likely to be book shoppers, but that is where the next misconceived perception of likelihood of small world stories comes in.
 
 

    People with common origins and interests often have common life experiences.  For example, many of the people I attended high school with in a small rural town in northwest Missouri (pop. 10,000), are now professionals within 150 miles from home in the Kansas City areas (pop. 1.5 million).  I have heard a number of stories from friends who haven't seen each other since the day we graduated from high school, only to run into them in a video store in some suburb of Kansas City.  Given then circumstances outlined above, over time, such encounters are almost inevitable.
    As a geologist, I have met many other geologists in my day.  Although people obviously have varied interests, there are many traits that tend to draw people into certain fields of work.  These provide for a larger list of potential shared activities and a decrease in a certain number of things that they are likely to do.   For example, in much later discussion with Mike, the Iowegian-geologist-park-ranger, he and I discovered that several years before, we had both visited some of the same very small and remote villages in central Norway (but not on the same day).
Artists know artists, bookkeepers know bookkeepers, cardiologists know cardiologists, ... zoologists know zoologists.  In addition, people are much more finely tuned to (aware of) their own interests.  As a necessity people are selective as to what they perceive, letting the rest of the overload of daily stimuli pass them by.  A new car owner "sees more" models of his or her new car on the highway than other drivers.  Pregnant couples typically perceive half the population to be pregnant with them.  Cat lovers see and talk cats.  Academics gravitate towards bookstores.  You notice the name of your alma matter on a sweatshirt, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.  In other words your interests not only draws you together with people you are more likely to have a connection with, but it is also more likely that the connection will be recognized.
 
 

    Magnets.--Some places are much more visited than others.  The odds of meeting people at these high traffic "magnets" are greatly increased.  Paris is a gateway to Europe.  Most people who have spent any time traveling in Europe have at least passed through Paris.  Some 10,000 Americans are actually residents of the city at any one time, and the number of American tourists on the streets of Paris during the summer must be staggering.  In fact, I would venture that if you set up shop at the base of the Eiffel tower during peak season and made an active effort to identify people you know, you would undoubtedly find someone within a week.
     Two real quick Paris stories.  My friend Rob who was in graduate school in Urbana with me was walking the streets of Paris one afternoon after a conference.  He heard his name called and turned to see a woman who was the girl friend of another graduate student in our department at Illinois.  Rob had only met her a couple of times at parties and certainly wouldn't have spent precious Paris time looking for her.  Nevertheless, she recognized Rob in a crowd in a distant land and called him over.
    Jay, a mutual friend of Rob and mine, lived in Paris some years later as a postdoc.  One day while eating lunch in a small cafe on a back street of Paris, Jay recognized a woman he knew from high school who walked past outside.  Jay got up, rushed out, jumped in front of her on the sidewalk, and then realized that he couldn't remember her name.  Fortunately for him, Jay is a very memorable character in his own right and she remembered him.  This illustrates that the mind can store acquaintances so deep in the memory that they can be recognized as acquaintances, even if they can't be identified by name.
    Paris is just one example of a magnet that draws large numbers of people to it.  Any popular place, such as the Grand Canyon or Statue of Liberty, or a festival such as the Olympics‘ or a major city summer festival will unknowingly draw your acquaintances from all over.  When I was in high school we would attend big rock concerts in Kansas City, some 125 miles away and we were always "amazed" that we would see people we knew from home.  Same with big sports events, theme parks, casinos, and minor tourist traps.  For example, I have been to the Nelson-Atkins Art Gallery (magnet) in Kansas City only twice in the past ten years.  Both times I saw Father Tom, a Catholic priest who I knew from mutual friends in college.  I don't even know where he lives, but I'm sure he doesn't work at the museum.

    Isolation.--The opposite of a magnet is a remote place where there are very few people.  In such a place it is inevitable that any two individuals will "encounter" each other whether they know each other or not.  In big magnets, such as Paris, it is very possible that two acquaintances could eat at the same crowded restaurant at the same time and never recognize each other in the masses.  If they were the only two people on top of a remote mountain at the same time, they would be guaranteed to encounter each other.
    There are two types of isolation.  In physical isolation the place is remote.  For example, on New Year's day one year I was hiking by myself on a trail on the Blue Ridge Parkway in the mountains of North Carolina.  It was a short trail down to a waterfall and back (no loop). The only people that I saw on the trail all afternoon happened to be a couple that I had known in Urbana, but who had moved to North Carolina several years ago.  I didn't know them very well, but he had lived with friends of mine and she was a close friend of another friend of mine from different circles.  The odds of us meeting on a trail in North Carolina were unexpected, but once we were all on the trail, the fact that we would meet was inevitable, as we were the only humans present for miles on a path that must meet coming and going.
 Similar "remote" scenarios can be speculated upon for the only two early risers in a park for an early morning run or two night owls in an empty late night coffee shop.  Remember that successfully making the encounter is "half" the work in a small world story.
    A second type of isolation is cultural.  For example, my friend Basim was born in Basrah, Iraq.  We shared an office in the geology department in Adelaide, South Australia.  Basim had only been in Adelaide a few weeks when a new friend of his told him that he knew an Iraqi woman working at the local hospital.  Basim called this woman and it turned out that she was also from Basrah (a city of 3-million), and she knew his family (she remembered his parents as proficient ballroom dancers at the club on weekends when she was little).  In addition, she turned out to be the cousin of one of Basim's childhood friends.  She informed Basim that his friend was now living in Perth, Australia.  The last Basim knew, his friend was living in India, and he had lost track of him years ago.  Of course Basim called his old friend in Perth and some months later they actually got together.   Later, Basim was attending a geology conference when a stranger came up to him and told him that he had a colleague who had just started work in Sydney who was Iraqi.  He gave Basim the man's name and it was a person with whom Basim had attended graduate school with in Baghdad.  Again, Basim had lost track of him years ago, but they got in contact by phone.
    Although it is remarkable that Basim knew these people, I would argue that it was virtually inevitable that these people would have learned about each other's existence.  There just are not that many Iraqis living in Australia, so when a new one does arrive, the "word" gets around quickly.  How long do you think it would take for two people from Cleveland to find each other if they were both living in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia?  I would also note that Basim is a very motivated individual.  He is the type to embark to, and succeed in new and unknown lands.  His chosen friends are of the same temper.
 
 

    Most of the small world examples I have given so far have been "Type-1" encounters, where one individual meets a second individual who they already know somewhere unexpectedly.  The probability of such encounters has to do with the total number of people each of these know, and the common tie (draw) of the place where they meet.
    A second type of small world encounter (Type-2) is when two strangers meet for the first time and discover that they both have a common acquaintance.  Sometimes the remoteness of the situation, the connecting of two worlds through a common thread not physically present at the time, makes this type of encounter even more mystical.  This mystique can even be enhanced when two people have known each other many years, only to find out that they have common acquaintance from times past.  Note however, that when more people are introduced into the equation, there are more total acquaintances to potentially have in common. In addition, the effect is not increased additatively, but rather geometrically.  Meaning that each of your acquaintances potentially has just as many acquaintances and each of them has just as many.  Say you know a modest 10,000 people: any one of them is your friend Joe, but each of those 10,000 knows a modest 10,000.  That means that the total potential pool of people known by your all of your friends is 100 million.  This means two things: first, many of your friends already share common friends; and secondly, total pool of people known by your friends is much larger than you think.  Thus the odds of having a second order (Type-2 small world encounter) are actually much greater than a Type-1.
    Additional levels can be added.  For example, a Type-3 encounter occurs when two people find that they share some place or experience.  For example both grew up in the same town, or belong to the same club, or took the same vacation.  It is almost impossible to calculate the odds for Type-3 encounters because you are drawing upon the totality of your life experience.  Back to the Paris example, once the fact is established that two people have been to Paris independently, it would be a greater small world story if neither of them had visited the Eiffel tower than if both had.
    Fourth type of encounter is based on any combination of  Types 1, 2 or 3 into a single event.  Sometimes the complexity of telling a Type-4 small world encounter generates the mystique and improbability of the event itself.  For example:  In 1957 my father owned a contemporary jewelry store in Lawrence, Kansas.  He purchased some pseudo-Scandinavian wire chairs for the shop. Ten years later he moved to Maryville, Missouri, across the street from the man who owned the small factory that manufactured the chairs.  Years later my brother married a local woman whose father had worked in the factory welding the chairs some thirty years previously.  It is a paradox that these Type-4 evens seem all the more improbable, because they are actually the sum total of all of our life events crossing the sum total of other people' life events.  In addition many of these events are directly correlated, that is, my brother met his wife because her family lived in the town where the chairs were made.  People know people in the place where they live (if they hadn't lived there it is much less likely they would have known them, therefore two-factors actually combine to one).
    This can be illustrated somewhat in the following examples: Thomas Stoppard's play "Six Degrees of Separation" is based on the premise that every individual is connected to every other individual on the planet through a maximum of six other common friends or acquaintances.  That is, if I met  stranger named Joe Bloe, one of my friend's friend's friend would know one of his friend's, friend's, friends.  A spoof of this principle is played out (and "convincingly" demonstrated) in the popular World Wide Web sites: Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, The Oracle of Kevin Bacon, and The Kevin Bacon Game.  In these computer data sets, you can type the name of any actor who has ever played in a movie in Hollywood and the computer (or now ANY One The Associate Degrees of Kevin Bacon) and the program will connect that actor with Kevin Bacon within a few shared actor/movie roles.  For example if you type "Elvis Presley" the sequence would return:

• Presley, Elvis was in King Creole (1958) with Matthau, Walter
• Matthau, Walter was in JFK (1991) with Bacon, Kevin

1.  10,000
2.  100,000,000
3.  1,000,000,000,000
4.  10,000,000,000,000,000
5.  100,000,000,000,000,000,000
6.  1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

    An example, a friend of mine, Denise, had known a friend in graduate school for some time.  They knew each other long enough to get to know each other's family histories.  It turned out that Denise's grandmother and this woman's grandmother had both grown up in the same small town in Wisconsin.  Neither of their families live there now, nor had either of Denise or her friend visited there.  Denise's grandmother is dead, but her friends grandmother said that although she was not close friends with Denise's grandmother, she distinctly remember the her and their family.
    There is definitely something mystical about acquaintances, encounters and friendships skipping forgotten generations, and reuniting along the time-line.  However, if one acknowledges that we are up to three degrees of separation (each woman to their grandparent and connection of grandparents), we see that the numbers of potential contacts rises quickly.  The real testimony here arises from the fact that the two people recognized the connection in the first place.  Do you know the childhood hometown of the twenty grand parents of your five closest friend's? What small world stories are you missing out on?
    The seeming improbability of second or third order small world stories may even cause the mind to deny the reality of the situation. For example the connection:

When we were fifth grade a family moved to town that was sort of like the Brady Bunch.  Mr. Brewer had two daughters from a first marriage.  Later he married a woman and adopted her three boys, from previous marriage.  The kids were all about my age and they were quite popular until their parents got divorced and they all moved away at the end of eighth grade.  One of the girls, Dolly, sometimes hung out with a group of my friends, which included a guy named Paul (we were all 13 yrs old).  Years later, when we were in college, Paul was friends with a guy named Rob who had grown up in a small town nearby.  Paul had met Rob's mother, knew she had been divorced when Rob was in high school, and knew that she had been remarried.  Paul had known Rob for many years before they all happened to be in Kansas City and were invited over to Rob's mother's and stepfather's place for dinner.  Apparently no one had bothered to ever tell Paul that Rob's mother had married Mr. Brewer and that his daughter Dolly would be joining them for dinner.  Poor Paul sat through dinner with this woman asking him strange questions about his hometown and distant acquaintances that Paul himself hadn't thought of in years.  Paul assumed that she had gone to college there, but that he had never met her.  Three quarters the way through dinner Paul had an Epiphany, pointed at the woman, and loudly declared with genuine joy and surprise, "YOU'RE DOLLY BREWER!"  Which of course, amused all present to no end.
    The point of this story is that the idea of connecting Dolly Brewer as the stepsister of his close friend Rob, was such a far stretch, that even under conditions presented to him, his mind refused to make the connection.  I invite you to work out a scenario for yourself of two individuals you have known and imagine your surprise to see two distant worlds suddenly connected.  However, I would remind you that half of all the people you know will get divorced and in the rural country of northwest Missouri (or any other socio-, cultural-, professional-group) the odds that they will remarry someone else you know are actually fairly high.
 

     Well, just as I said.  When I was in Ireland on a paleontology field trip, I met a colleague who grew up in Connecticut, but is now living in New Zealand with her Kiwi husband.  The second day on the trip I wore a T-shirt from a Hawaiian Evolution meeting I had attended the previous year.  She immediately recognized the conference logo and said that her husband, an evolutionary biologist, had attended the same meeting.  She and I discussed the conference and it's affiliated field trips and we surmised that her husband and I must have been in the same group of about 20 people who hiked in to watch some active lava flows.  Two years later, I met her husband at a meeting in Melbourne and confirmed that he and I had been on the same field trip in Hawaii.  But ... that is not the end of the coincidence.  When I returned from Ireland I started teaching in Boone, North Carolina.  One day I was talking with a colleague of mine there about the Hawaiian volcanoes and I said that it was such a great experience, except for the National Park Ranger who "led" the tour, who was a useless yahoo.  The worst part was that the park ranger was a geology Ph.D. student, so you would have thought he would have had even more to offer a volcano field trip.  My friend in Boone proceeded to describe the physical characteristics and mannerisms of this lame park ranger, and confirmed that he had been her field assistant in Alaska for a season (one to forget).
    Two points come from this encounter (one field trip with three people, two of which are connected to two other from difference places, both of whom connect with me at even different places).  Cosmic!   However, I can't even calculate the number of degrees of separation here (how many total people all six of us know and all of the places that all six of us have ever been).  Plus, and this is a big one, we are all geologists/evolutionary biologists, which greatly limits the pool of potential people and greatly increased the likelihood that we would be doing the same things (conferences and volcanoes).  Nevertheless, it's still a story worth telling.
 
 

    Growing up it seemed like most of the best stories I heard from other kids were always sourced from some kid's bachelor uncle (half-way in age between the kid and the parent).  I have heard stories originating from any number of Uncle Bobs, Uncle Georges, Uncle Daves and Uncle Turks, but some of the most memorable came from one Uncle Donnie.  This is only important in the context of the title of this section, because as Uncle Donnie stories were always told they would unravel, often incoherently if not nonsequetorially to a rousing climax filled with awe, incomprehension shock and laughter.  In the approaching lull after the climax, Uncle Donnie stories always proceeded and concluded with the phrase, "But that's not the weird part!"
    The "weird part" of this topic being that after analyzing and some-what demystifying the "inevitability" of small world encounters, to me the really intriguing part now is to realize how many small world events occur and go unrecognized by the parties involved.  There must be a zillion cases where two people who know each other pass unnoticed in a busy shop a thousand miles from home; or two strangers pass the time in a public place like a bus stop, never knowing that they share a common friend; or perhaps weirdest of all, two friends spend an entire lifetime without knowing they share a common friend or significant event in their past.
    Having said all of this, there are still some small world stories that are just too mystical to analyze.  A classic small world story comes from David, who I knew from graduate school at Illinois.  When David was in Junior High School on Long Island, his parents sponsored a foreign exchange student from the Philippines.  After they had picked up the high school girl from the airport and were getting to know her the first night home, it came out that the girl's mother had attended university in the States; the University of Illinois to be exact.  This was greeted warmly, as both of David's parents are Illinois alumni.  David's mother said that her freshman roommate had in fact been from the Philippines, and her name was Maria Gomez.  The girl smiled and said my mother's maiden name was Maria Gomez.  David's mother pulls out her freshman yearbook and the girl confirmed that it was indeed a picture of her mother.  David's family called the Philippines that night and spoke to the mother/roommate.  What are the odds?
 
 

The odds are not of one encounter happening at a given place at a given time. (very low)
The odds are than any encounter will ever happen anywhere, anytime. (very high)
Factors that increase the odds of any event occurring.

 1.  subset of your acquaintances is much larger than you think;
 2.  can exclude a large number of people you will never know;
 3.  like people have like habits;
 4.  like people have like friends;
      people tend to notice only people and things that are of interest to them.
 5.  location, itself, often facilitates the meeting;
      magnet areas draw lots of people, primed for encounters
      isolation forces people to have encounters
           physical isolation - two people alone
           cultural isolation - two people who have common differences from the masses.
 6.  increased degrees of separation (more complexity) actually increase the chances
      of the even occurring.

There are four types of small world encounters.

     1.  meeting of acquaintance that you already know somewhere unexpectedly.
     2.  meeting a stranger who shares a common acquaintance with you.
     3.  having a common life experience with someone.
     4.  some complex combination of these three.

    Some of my small world stories are made somewhat more spectacular by the fact that my friends and I have had the good fortune to travel around the world some.  However, this is not a prerequisite for a good small world story.  In fact, by some of the principles illustrated here, it is more likely that you will cross paths with other well traveled brethren in foreign lands, simply by the nature of the participants and places they travel.  A person who spends their life managing a Kwick-n-Go on a well-traveled road will undoubtedly have just as many small world story stories come to them.  The magic in all of this is recognizing the small world encounter when it does occur.
 

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