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Concept
Mathematical sociology
Summary
Mathematical sociology or the sociology of mathematics is an interdisciplinary field of research concerned both with the use of mathematics within sociological research as well as research into the relationships that exist between maths and society.
Because of this, mathematical sociology can have a diverse meaning depending on the authors in question and the kind of research being carried out. This creates contestation over whether mathematical sociology is a derivative of sociology, an intersection of the two disciplines, or a discipline in its own right. This is a dynamic, ongoing academic development that leaves mathematical sociology sometimes blurred and lacking in uniformity, presenting grey areas and need for further research into developing its academic merit.
Starting in the early 1940s, Nicolas Rashevsky, and subsequently in the late 1940s, Anatol Rapoport and others, developed a relational and probabilistic approach to the characterization of large social networks in which the nodes are persons and the links are acquaintanceship. During the late 1940s, formulas were derived that connected local parameters such as closure of contacts – if A is linked to both B and C, then there is a greater than chance probability that B and C are linked to each other – to the global network property of connectivity.
Moreover, acquaintanceship is a positive tie, but what about negative ties such as animosity among persons? To tackle this problem, graph theory, which is the mathematical study of abstract representations of networks of points and lines, can be extended to include these two types of links and thereby to create models that represent both positive and negative sentiment relations, which are represented as signed graphs. A signed graph is called balanced if the product of the signs of all relations in every cycle (links in every graph cycle) is positive. Through formalization by mathematician Frank Harary, this work produced the fundamental theorem of this theory. It says that if a network of interrelated positive and negative ties is balanced, e.
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