We live in an age of so-called Big Data. We hear terms like data scientist, and there is much talk about analytics and the mining of large amounts of corporate data for tidbits of business value. There are even apocryphal stories involving diapers and beer selling together in the same store aisle. The common theme is the problem of having large amounts of data and somehow converting that data into actionable information. Enter graph theory. It’s a branch of mathematics concerned with pairwise relationships between objects. Graph theory can be taught abstractly, and probably often is. It’s very practical though. Imagine mapping all the link relationships in a web site. One page might turn out to be in more relationships than all the others, and perhaps that page is an important one. Likewise, one can examine relationships between people in a group, and perhaps the person having the largest number of connections could also be seen as having the widest influence. Certainly, you’d want that well-connected person if your goal were to spread a piece of news or gossip quickly.
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