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On Sun, 2003-01-26 at 11:38, Steve Borgatti wrote:
>
> Although, if memory serves (which means it mostly doesn't), those early
> articles had something vaguely disturbing in common with the current
> physicist-inspired ones -- an arrogant new- science-of-everything sort of
> flavor.


What's more, it's not even true that physicists only discovered networks
in the 90s.  For instance, the whole issue about "scale-free networks"
that they make a lot of in the NYT article, far from being a recent
discovery, was described beautifully in a 1965 article about citation
networks by Derek de Solla Price, who was a theoretical physicist by
training although he made contributions in many fields.  See D. J. de
Solla Price, "Networks of scientific papers", Science 149, 510-515
(1965).  And Rapoport touched on the same ideas even earlier in his work
on friendship networks, although he didn't specifically discuss
power-law degree sequences.

Still, as David Gibson points out, one shouldn't blame Duncan Watts for
this.  In fact, Duncan gives ample credit to the pioneers of the field
in his new book.

Mark Newman.

--
Mark Newman
Center for the Study of Complex Systems
University of Michigan

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