Networks

Networks can be found in a broad range of contexts, e.g. WWW, citation or cellular networks. Understanding their structure is the first step towards controlling their properties such as the spread of information on the web, the spread of diseases in social networks or the stability of a network against failure of single nodes. These real networks are neither completely random nor regular which makes them hard to describe with conventional approaches, but this "semi-randomness" also leads to peculiar features such as high clustering, short path lengths between nodes and power law distributions. In this journal talk I will give an introduction to real networks and present two recently developed models which capture these characteristics. [1] S H Strogatz, Nature 410, 268 (2001) [2] R Albert and A-L Barabasi, Review of Modern Physics 74, 47 (2002)