What if there were a science that could help you understand why high school was (for so many of us) so horrible? What if there were a science that laid bare the dynamics of cliques, in-crowds and outsiders with the mathematical precision of a moon shot?
Well, there pretty much is such a science ā and, as the age of "big data" rises, this new field called network science is opening vistas on everything from high school social webs to the spread of deadly diseases.
There are many, many questions network science can answer. But to get a sense of how it all works, let's start with one that haunts most of humanity at one time or another: "Am I important?"
To get a network science answer to this question, I turned to Prof. Matthew O. Jackson of Stanford University. I've been taking Prof. Jackson's networks class on Coursera in my own attempt to understand the field for a "city science" project I want to begin.
As Prof. Jackson told us in class, a network in its simplest form is just a set of "nodes" and the "links" between them. The nation's airports and their connecting flights form one version of a network. Another form of network is embodied via all the people in your high school class (they are the nodes) and their friendships, rivalries and romances (those are the links). Quantitatively untangling the spiderweb-like structures these networks embody is the first task of network science
[For more of this story, written by Adam Frank, go to http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/...82/are-you-important]
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