“Linked” – Albert-László Barabási

Having some vague notions about connectedness and network topologies I had been looking to learn more about this buzz area. If you are in the same boat, “Linked” is an excellent place to start as it offers nicely sized chunks of information on scale-free networks, power law distributions and the small world phenomenon.

The subtitle “How everything is connected to everything else and what it means for business, science and everyday life”, while being too long to include in the title of this post, gives an idea of what this book is all about.

For example, the omnipresent Six Degrees of Separation is explained and de-mystified (did you know it was first documented in a Hungarian short story and that Kevin Bacon is not actually the most connected actor in Hollywood?) to show that there is a short path between any two nodes (proteins, actors, websites, friends) in many networks, even though that number is not necessarily six.

Barabási opens each chapter with a human-interest anecdote; this and the fact that the only equations he uses are demoted to footnotes make for fluent reading and an accessible style. You will read about the 9/11 attacks, the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, networks of cellular metabolism, the Internet and the World Wide Web (perhaps, like me, you will finally understand what the difference between the latter two is).

“When will a thinking machine, orders of magnitude faster than a human brain, emerge spontaneously from billions of interconnected modules?” Apart from a tiny sub-chapter about how our wired up planet might give rise to a self-aware super-computer, Barabási’s portrait of networks is all positive and instills in the reader the excitement that made him study them in so much depth. I couldn’t recommend it more.

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