Are your friends more popular than you are? Temple mathematician John Allen Paulos answered this question for Scientific American. "We are all more likely to become friends with someone who has a lot of friends than we are to befriend someone with few friends. It's not that we avoid those with few friends; rather it's more probable that we will be among a popular person's friends simply because he or she has a larger number of them," he wrote. "The number of friends we have is typical of many situations in which the average deviates from individuals' experience."