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"Physics: the art of networking," by Philip Ball, Nature Science Update, 25 October 2000.
Ball's article introduces the topic of "small world" networks with the concept of the "small world of social networks" premise of the play Six Degrees of Separation. (This now-familiar idea is that everyone on the planet is connected to any other randomly chosen person by a chain of no more than six mutual acquaintances.) From there Ball summarizes: "In 1998 two researchers at Cornell University found that `small-world' networks can be identified by a particular mathematical relationship between the average shortest distance between two nodes and the total number of nodes." He distinguishes small-world from random networks, identifying small-world networks as scale-free (such as the World Wide Web). He also reports on recent research by Luis Amaral et al that identifies at least two other kinds of small-world networks which depend on the number of links a typical node has.
--- Annette Emerson
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