Scale Free Networks and the Small World Phenomenon

Scale Free Networks and the

Small World Phenomenon

Over the last few years, an overwhelming amount of attention has been giving to a new science of networks. This new cohort of research takes a closer look at trying to understand the rules behind how certain networks are formed and how they evolve. This new understanding of networks is starting to depart from its previous graph theory oriented background and branch across to more sociology based field of studies, in order to help scientist obtain a better idea of how anything from ideas, diseases, information, and influence can spread from one point to another.

At the center of this research are what scientist call small world networks. Their name comes from the first glance appearance that the actual network or world tends to be far smaller than at first assumed. Resulting in two nodes of the network being connected by far fewer nodes that expected. The most typical example in explaining this phenomenon is what is usually referred to as having "six degrees of separation" between any two humans in the world, meaning that any two people in a world of 6 billion inhabitants are connected by only six or fewer connections in between them.

Scientists are discovering these small world networks to be all around us. As we will see, these somewhat disordered small world networks hold tremendous potential as models for the interaction networks of more complex systems. It is by looking at these networks as