Three degrees of Tania Mallet

The notion that everyone on Earth is connected to anyone else on Earth by at most six interpersonal links is popularly known as six degrees of Kevin Bacon . Because the phrase doesn’t identify six as an upper limit, I’d come to think of it as an average. Playing yesterday on a website called the Oracle of Bacon soon disabused me.

The oracle makes use of the Internet Movie Database to identify how many degrees of professional separation lie between Bacon and anyone else in the movie and TV industries. Being competitive, I tried to pick actors whose Bacon number (the smallest number of professional links to Bacon) exceeded six. I couldn’t.

As a fan of James Bond, I knew that Tania Mallet (shown here) is a former model who made only one movie, Goldfinger. Her Bacon number is 3.

Assuming that contemporary Hollywood is professionally and socially distant from Japan in the 1910s and 20s, I next tried linking Bacon to Matsunosuke Onoe. Born in 1875, Onoe was Japan’s first movie superstar. Amazingly, his Bacon number is 4, just one higher than Mallet’s. The Korean actor and director Woon-gyu Na (1902–37) has a Bacon number of 5.

As a matter of fact, the Oracle of Bacon will evaluate the degrees of separation between any two actors. The results will be similar. Onoe, for example, has a Mallet number of 3. Evidently, the movie industry is supremely interconnected.

For physicists, the challenge and attraction of studying networks lies in identifying generic behavior. Bacon has made more than 60 movies; Mallet just one. An ecosystem of interconnected Bacons and Mallets yields a network whose topology resembles that of the airline route system or the national grid.

To be useful—or even to qualify as scientific—a theoretical model should make predictions. As Mark Newman described in “The physics of networks” (Physics Today, November 2008, page 33 ), network theory can predict how networks respond to the removal or addition of nodes. In an ecological network, that translates to predicting the fate of a ecosystem if a species becomes extinct—and to devising strategies for safeguarding the ecosystem.

Not being an actor, I can’t use the Oracle of Bacon to evaluate my own Bacon number, but I already know my Newman number. He and I lived next to each other in the same building in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.

Thanks to AIP’s Chris Iannicello for telling me about the Oracle of Bacon. He posted a link to it on another network, Facebook.