Every student on campus is one degree removed from College President Larry Arnn, according to the Applied Math Club.

The Applied Math club’s newest project, Degrees of Arnn, seeks to determine how connected Hillsdale’s campus is. This project was modeled after the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” law.

The project started when senior Daniel Brand speculated that because Hillsdale was so small, if he did not know a person, one of his friends would.

Members of the club hypothesized that any individual on campus could be connected to any other by one mutual friend.

“About a month ago, we began to elaborate on certain questions to test this,” senior Jack Graham said. “For example, how do you tell if you know someone or not? How connected are two people through others on campus?” Graham asked.

The project’s results have been interesting so far, according to junior Lydia Hilton.

“We ran our first stage at a table in the student union,” Hilton said. “We had random people come up to us, and we would randomly generate 15 students from the school directory. Then, we had people go through and see how many people they could identify from the list by both name and face.”

Graham said one of the main challenges of the study has been acquiring reliable information.

“Getting the data has been the hardest part,” Graham said. “We have lots of ideas about what kinds of data we would like to get and what we would like to do with it once we have it.”

Participants in the Degrees of Arnn project look at pictures and names of 15 random Hillsdale students and identify those they know. Then, the math club runs the results through an algorithm that constructs a path from person to person, connecting friend groups and individuals on a visual map.

“Once we run that, we will be able to look at the matrix and find things like the highest degree, the lowest degree, and the most common degree of separation,” senior Emily Balsbaugh said.

Balsbaugh said the project has shown her Hillsdale is less interconnected than she thought.

“As a senior, one begins to feel that they know everyone on campus,” she said. “Getting random students in the directory and realizing that you don’t know who they are makes campus feel a lot bigger.”