peripatetic
adjective

- travelling around to different places, usually because you work in more than one place

- walking about or from place to place; traveling on foot

The Cambridge Dictionary / Your Dictionary

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WORD ORIGIN

The term "peripatetic" specifically refers to someone who is walking or traveling around, often in a philosophical or thoughtful manner, derived from the Greek term "peripatētikos" which means "given to walking about." The word is commonly used to describe the teaching style of Aristotle and his followers, who were known for walking around as they discussed philosophical ideas.

"Peripatetic" as an adjective meaning "walking about from place to place" is from the 1640s.

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THE “SMALL-WORLD EFFECT”

One way to explain the small-world effect is the story of Paul Erdos, the PERIPATETIC mathematician. Erdos famously did not pay rent or own property; instead, he spent his life couch-surfing at the homes of his mathematician friends. Each visit produced a mathematical paper or two.

Over the years, he wrote hundreds of papers with his hosts. As a tribute, the mathematics community devised the “Erdos number,” to measure the collaboration distance to him. Paul Erdos’s co-authors had an Erdos Number of “1”; people who wrote papers with them had an Erdos number of “2”, and so on. About a quarter million published mathematicians had an Erdos Number, with a majority of them smaller than “5”.

Remarkable as Erdos was, he was quite ordinary from the social network point of view. Anyone can be an Erdos. Let’s pick an “ordinary Joe”. His friends will have a “Joe Number” of 1, their friends will have a “Joe Number” of 2 and so on. In fact, unless there is something seriously wrong with Joe, half the people in the United States will be linked to him by six hops – degrees of separation – or less. Yes, it really is “a small world”.

Our decreasing social distance to other people in the world… rewards us with serendipitous discoveries of connectedness. Next time you are waiting at an airport or a bar, strike up a conversation with a perfect stranger: You may have a lot more in common than you think.

Adapted from The University of Southern California - International Academy

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SYNONYMS

ambulatory, ambulant, constant in motion, continuously moving, drifting, ever-moving, footloose, footloose and fancy-free, free-roaming, globetrotting, go-about, gypsy-like, hobo-like, itinerant, journeying, meandering, migratory, nomadic, on the go (the move, the road) peregrine, PERIPATETIC, rambling, roaming, roving (around), sauntering, touring, traipsing, vagabond, wandering, wayfaring, without a fixed course, without a fixed home

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SMUGGLE OWAD into an English conversation, say something like:

“The hilarious wordplay-headline in ‘The India Times’ about a PERIPATETIC cow — ’Moo good to be true’ — made me laugh out loud!”

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