Network science is an academic field which studies complex networks such as telecommunication networks, computer networks, biological networks, cognitive and semantic networks, and social networks, considering distinct elements or actors represented by nodes (or vertices) and the connections between the elements or actors as links (or edges). The field draws on theories and methods including graph theory from mathematics, statistical mechanics from physics, data mining and information visualization from computer science, inferential modeling from statistics, and social structure from sociology. The United States National Research Council defines network science as "the study of network representations of physical, biological, and social phenomena leading to predictive models of these phenomena."
The study of networks has emerged in diverse disciplines as a means of analyzing complex relational data. The earliest known paper in this field is the famous Seven Bridges of Königsberg written by Leonhard Euler in 1736. Euler's mathematical description of vertices and edges was the foundation of graph theory, a branch of mathematics that studies the properties of pairwise relations in a network structure. The field of graph theory continued to develop and found applications in chemistry (Sylvester, 1878).
Dénes Kőnig, a Hungarian mathematician and professor, wrote the first book in Graph Theory, entitled "Theory of finite and infinite graphs", in 1936.
In the 1930s Jacob Moreno, a psychologist in the Gestalt tradition, arrived in the United States. He developed the sociogram and presented it to the public in April 1933 at a convention of medical scholars. Moreno claimed that "before the advent of sociometry no one knew what the interpersonal structure of a group 'precisely' looked like" (Moreno, 1953). The sociogram was a representation of the social structure of a group of elementary school students. The boys were friends of boys and the girls were friends of girls with the exception of one boy who said he liked a single girl.
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The study of random walks finds many applications in computer science and communications. The goal of the course is to get familiar with the theory of random walks, and to get an overview of some appl
A small-world network is a mathematical graph in which most nodes are not neighbors of one another, but the neighbors of any given node are likely to be neighbors of each other. Due to this, most neighboring nodes can be reached from every other node by a small number of hops or steps. Specifically, a small-world network is defined to be a network where the typical distance L between two randomly chosen nodes (the number of steps required) grows proportionally to the logarithm of the number of nodes N in the network, that is: while the global clustering coefficient is not small.
In the context of network theory, a complex network is a graph (network) with non-trivial topological features—features that do not occur in simple networks such as lattices or random graphs but often occur in networks representing real systems. The study of complex networks is a young and active area of scientific research (since 2000) inspired largely by empirical findings of real-world networks such as computer networks, biological networks, technological networks, brain networks, climate networks and social networks.
In network theory, a giant component is a connected component of a given random graph that contains a significant fraction of the entire graph's vertices. More precisely, in graphs drawn randomly from a probability distribution over arbitrarily large graphs, a giant component is a connected component whose fraction of the overall number of vertices is bounded away from zero. In sufficiently dense graphs distributed according to the Erdős–Rényi model, a giant component exists with high probability.
Ce cours constitue la seconde partie d'un enseignement consacré aux bases théoriques et pratiques des systèmes d’information géographique. Il propose une introduction aux systèmes d’information géogra
Ce cours constitue la seconde partie d'un enseignement consacré aux bases théoriques et pratiques des systèmes d’information géographique. Il propose une introduction aux systèmes d’information géogra
Learn how to describe, model and control urban traffic congestion in simple ways and gain insight into advanced traffic management schemes that improve mobility in cities and highways.
Dynamical flow networks serve as macroscopic models for, e.g., transportation networks, queuing networks, and distribution networks. While the flow dynamics in such networks follow the conservation of mass on the links, the outflow from each link is often ...
Water distribution systems (WDSs) are complex networks with numerous interconnected junctions and pipes. The robustness and reliability of these systems are critically dependent on their network structure, necessitating detailed analysis for proactive leak ...
Basel2024
In this paper, we propose a novel approach that employs kinetic equations to describe the collective dynamics emerging from graph-mediated pairwise interactions in multi-agent systems. We formally show that for large graphs and specific classes of interact ...