Independence

3 pages on this site touch on this topic.

• Independence and dependence: what tells you what — Most 'multiply the probabilities together' coincidence math secretly assumes independence that real events, sharing culture, geography, and cause, rarely have.
• Network Crossings — A toy social-network model shows how a few random long-range connections make two 'strangers' sharing a mutual friend far less surprising.
• Networks and small worlds — Real social networks mix tight local clustering with a few long-range shortcuts, making unlikely-feeling encounters mathematically unsurprising.