THE
EMERGING SCIENCE OF NETWORKSDuncan
WattsYahoo!
LabsThe
Small-World Problem- “Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet”
- John Guare, 1990
- First mentioned in 1920’s by Karinthy
- 1950’s Pool and Kochen first math investigation
- Milgram’s Small-World Experiment 1960’s
- Watts and Strogatz (1998)
- showed that “small-world” property was exhibited by many real world networks, including social networks
- more generally showed that “complex networks” have interesting mathematical and dynamical properties
Network
Science- Twelve years later we have a good understanding of how the small world phenomenon works
- Also starting to understand other characteristics of large-scale networks
- New theories, better models, faster computers, and mountains of digital data all contributing factors
- Result has been called “Science of Networks”