Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age Book

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by: Duncan J. Watts

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Customer Reviews
Average Rating: Rating: - Great book, perfect complement to Barabasi's Linked Duncan Watts' book is the perfect complement to Barabasi's Linked in two ways: (1) it focuses on small-world networks rather than (mostly) scale-free networks. (2) It focuses on the social and economic sciences -mostly human networks. Six Degrees is deep, accurate and at the same time clear and easy to read. For all those who liked the Tipping Point but were looking for more meat, Six Degrees makes the concepts accessible without sacrificing depth. As you may have guessed from this review, I loved the book! Rating: - networks in a variety of contexts Watts is one of the co-discoverers of small-world networks and this book joins others like 'Linked' by Barabasi and 'Nexus' by Mark Buchanan as a user-friendly introduction to the study of networks. It manages to cover a lot of ground and makes a persuasive case for the use of network models in fields as diverse as biology, economics and management and physics. I think this will make it interesting to a whole range of people. As a Math student studying biological networks I found the recap of the work on small-worlds very clear and useful. The style is fluent and brisk and the book expands on the types of networks under consideration in an exploratory and interesting manner. As the author shifts contexts, the need for networks with different features is made apparent and the plot unfolds like a good detective story. The bibliography is pretty cool too - it seems unusual that the same person would care to read the variety of items listed, but I think that's what might make this book appealing and stimulating to people working in a range of fields. In addition to small-world networks, there is fair coverage of scale-free networks and random nets, percolation and disease models. I'm not as mystified by the number '1' being a critical parameter in the connectivity of random networks and the reproduction rate for disease spreading. The sections on industrial economics and fads are at least as good as those of Barabasi and Buchanan. And the interesting details of more recent models and modifications (including mention of analytical solutions and the range of approaches to obtaining them) are presented in a weirdly informative non-technical manner. Hope there's a more technical work on the way

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age Book

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