p.7 Today we increasingly recognize that nothing happens in isolation. Most events and phenomena
are connected, caused by, and interacting with a huge number of other pieces of a complex universal puzzle. We have
come to see that we live in a small would, where everything is linked to everything else... We have come to grasp
the importance of networks.
p.7 Very few people realize, however, that the rapidly unfolding science of networks is uncovering phenomena
that are far more exciting and revealing than the casual use of the word network could ever convey. Some of these
discoveries are so fresh that many of the key results still circulate as unpublished papers within the scientific community.
They open up a novel perspective on the interconnected world around us... They will drive the fundamental questions that form
our view of the world in the coming era.
p.7 This book has a simple aim: to get you to think networks. It is about how networks
emerge, what they look like, and how they evolve... Networks are present everywhere. All we need is an eye for them.
[JLJ - perhaps even in the interaction among pieces in a simple board game]
p.12 The construction and structure of graphs or networks is the key to understanding the complex
world around us. Small changes in the topology, affecting only a few of the nodes or links, can open up hidden doors,
allowing new possibilities to emerge.
p.30 "Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked... All the best information
in every computer at CERN and on the planet would be available to me and anyone else. There would be a single global information
space." This was the dream of Tim Berners-Lee in 1980 while working as a programmer at the European Organization for Nuclear
Research, commonly known by its French acronym, CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland. To turn his dream into reality, he wrote a program
that allowed computers to share information - to link to each other.
p.68 Could it be that equally simple laws characterize most complex networks
and we had not seen them because we had not looked for them before?
p.111 In general, natural systems have a unique ability to survive in a wide range of conditions...
scientists from all disciplines have recognized the resilience of nature's designs, raising the hope that we can exploit that
convenience in human-made structures... Most systems displaying a high degree of tolerance against failures share
a common feature: Their functionality is guaranteed by a highly interconnected complex network... It seems
that nature strives to achieve robustness through interconnectivity.
p.225-226 The goal before us is to understand complexity. To achieve that, we must move beyond structure
and topology and start focusing on the dynamics that take place along the links. Networks are only the skeleton
of complex activity, the highways for the various processes that make our world hum. To describe society we must
dress the links of the social network with actual dynamical interactions between people. To understand life we must
start looking at the reaction dynamics along the links of the metabolic network... Embarking on the journey ahead
without a map would be hopeless. Fortunately the ongoing network revolution has already provided many of the key maps... we have learned the laws of web cartography, allowing us to draw new maps whenever we are faced with new systems. Now
we must follow these maps to complete the journey, fitting the pieces to one another, node by node and link by link, and capturing
their dynamic interplay.
p.230 Multitasking is an inherent property of most complex systems, alive or not.
p.232 Modularity is a defining feature of most complex systems.
p.237-238 networks have become the X-ray machines of our connectedness... Thanks to the rapid advances in
network theory it appears that we are not far from the next major step: constructing a general theory of complexity... most
earlier attempts to construct a theory of complexity have overlooked the deep link between it and networks. In most
systems, complexity starts where networks turn nontrivial... we continue to struggle with systems for which the interaction
map between the components is less ordered and rigid, hoping to give self-organization a chance.
p.238 The unpredictability of economic processes is rooted in the unknown interaction map behind the mythical
market. Therefore, networks are the prerequisite for describing any complex system, indicating that complexity theory
must inevitably stand on the shoulders of network theory.
p.261 In considering robustness we cannot ignore the dynamic properties of complex systems. Most
systems known to be robust have numerous controls and feedback loops to ensure that they survive errors and failures...
We learned that nature has carefully selected the structure of most complex systems, offering them an unparalleled degree
of error and failure tolerance. By virtue of their topology only, these systems display a high degree of resilience
