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简介：Summary:
Publisher Summary 1
Thinking systematically, many social and scientific phenomena can be described in a mathematical framework. Exemplars of such phenomena range from governance to food systems and even human interactions in workplaces. Caldarelli (finance, U. Sapienza, Rome) finds these systems to have only a few elements with many connections and many with only a few, a situation he says is a "scale-free" network. He describes the theoretical underpinnings and algorithms necessary to study these structures and features by introducing readers to graphs, and then explains communities in terms of graph structures, scale-invariance, the origins of power-law functions, and graph-generating models, then gives examples in the forms of networks in the cell, geophysical and ecological networks, the Internet and the world-wide web, social and cognitive networks and financial networks. The appendices include a glossary and material on graph quantities, basic statistics, matrices and eigenvectors, and population dynamics. Annotation 漏2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Publisher Summary 2
A variety of different social, natural and technological systems can be described by the same mathematical framework. This holds from Internet to the Food Webs and to the connections between different company boards given by common directors. In all these situations a graph of the elements and their connections displays a universal feature of some few elements with many connections and many with few. This book reports the experimental evidence of these ``Scale-free networks'' and provides to students and researchers a corpus of theoretical results and algorithms to analyse and understand these features. The contents of this book and their exposition makes it a clear textbook for the beginners and a reference book for the experts.
