(1) "The Small World Problem" by Stanley Milgram (Psychology Today 1 No. 1. pp. 61-67, May 1967). WITH (2): "An Experimental Study of the Small World Problem" by Jeffrey Travers and Stanley Milgram (Sociometry, 32 No. 4 pp. 425-443, December 1969). WITH (3): "The Strength of Weak Ties" by Mark S. Granovetter (American Journal of Sociology, 78 No. 6 pp. 1360-1380, May 1973). WITH (4): "Contacts and influence" by Itheil de Sola Pool and Manfred Kochen (Social Networks, 1 No. 1 pp. 5-51, August 3, 1978). WITH (5): "The Strength of the Weak Tie: Revisited" by Mark S. Granovetter (Sociological Theory, pp. 201-233, 1983). WITH (6): "Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks" by D. J. Watts and S. H. Strogatz (Nature, 393 Nno. 6684 pp. 440-4

Please write for FULL DESCRIPTION! [Papers 7-9, continued] WITH (7): "Emergence of scaling in random networks" by Brabási & Réka (Science, 286 No. 5439 pp. 509-512, October 15, 1999). With (8): "The Small-World Phenomenon: An Algorithmic Perspective" by John Kleinberg (Bound extract of Proceedings of the 32nd ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, pp. 163-170, May 21-23, 2000). WITH (9): Six Degrees of Separation, a Play by John Guare. [++] The "Small World Experiment" aimed to test the idea that any two people in the world could be connected by a short chain of acquaintances. In the experiment, Milgram asked participants in the United States to try to get a letter to a specific target person, who lived in Massachusetts, by passing it through their social network. The participants were instructed to send the letter to someone they knew on a first-name basis, who they thought would be more likely to know the target personally. This process of forwarding the letter continued until it reached the target. The surprising finding of the experiment was that the average number of intermediate links required to get the letter to the target was remarkably small. Milgram's research suggested that, on average, it took around six links or "six degrees of separation" to connect any two individuals in the U.S. The concept of "six degrees of separation" became widely known and has been popularized in various forms in popular culture and network theory. It implies that people in the world are more interconnected than we might think, and it played a significant role in shaping the field of social network analysis. [++] Milgrim's (#1) article appears in the inaugural issue of Psychology Today, and was an interesting and popular presentation that would after two years be supplemented with a longer technical article (and a co-author Jeffrey Travers, #2). The two Granovetter papers (#s 3+5) build on Milgram and are among the most important in the social sciences. His Strength of Weak Ties are pioneering, highly influential papers arguing that In marketing, information science, or politics, weak ties enable reaching populations and audiences that are not accessible via strong ties. Granovetter concludes that no strong tie is a bridge, and therefore all bridges are weak ties. Weak ties, he argues, are more likely to link members of different groups in networks than strong ones. Weak ties connect different actors and consequently enable the flow of information. Kochen and de Sola Pool (#4) formally and famously articulate the mechanics of social networks and explore the mathematical consequences of these (including connectedness). In 1998 Watts and Strogatz (#6) seminally documented the best known family of small-world networks and posited the network model as a framework to study the small-world problem. Their work "provided compelling evidence that the small-world phenomenon is pervasive in a range of networks arising in nature and technology, and a fundamental ingredient in the evolution of the WWW. Brabási and Réka (#7) introduce an algorithm used to generate random, scale-free networks. Scale-free networks are often observed in natural as well as human created systems, including cellular networks, the WWW, Internet, and social networks. Kleinberg's 2000 (8) paper rigorously quantifies the small-world network. Kleinberg first recognized that Milgram s small-world implicitly argues not only the presence of short paths between individuals in social networks, but also that people seem to be good at finding those paths, an apparently simple observation that turns out to have profound implications for the structure of the networks. Lastly, the play Six Degrees of Separation (9) is offered with the other material for a bit of levity. (Synopsis of papers by David Wenner, author of The History of Physics, the Wenner Collection.).…