Me and Jeff Bezos

You may have heard about 6 degrees of separation. It’s the idea that you are only 6 people away from anyone on Earth. Maybe not literally 6, but you get the idea. I read about this in the dot com years and thought it quite plausible. But gave it little heed until recently.

I was Googling past acquaintances. One of these was Dr Yasantha Rajakarunanayake. Yes, his surname is 8 syllables; he’s from Sri Lanka where such names are not unheard of. We were grad students in the same group at Caltech in the 80s. I was a year ahead of him. We ended up getting our PhDs in applied physics and went into…