Network Science

Network science is an academic field that studies complex networks such as telecommunication networks, computer networks, biological networks, cognitive and semantic networks and social networks, treating the elements as nodes and the connections between them as links. It draws on 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. Its history is usually traced to Leonhard Euler's 1736 paper on the Seven Bridges of Königsberg, which founded graph theory, and it passed through Jacob Moreno's sociograms in the 1930s and the Erdős and Rényi papers on random graphs. Interest exploded around 2000 when Albert-László Barabási and Réka Albert described the scale-free character of many real networks, from the World Wide Web to the cell, which gave the field its name. The United States National Research Council defines it as the study of network representations of physical, biological and social phenomena leading to predictive models of them.