Using E-Mail to Count Connections Although Dr. Milgram's theory has been accepted as applying worldwide, his famous results have not been replicated, nor have they been tested globally. Now a team of sociologists at Columbia University led by Duncan Watts, an assistant professor of sociology and author of "Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks Between Order and Randomness," is trying to assess the six-degrees hypothesis on a large scale, using e- mail as the medium for building the chains.