Linked : The New Science of Networks

By Albert-László Barabási

I came across this book kind of accidentally. One summer night in May, I went to downtown Mountain View for ice cream. There was a long line outside the ice cream shop. So I figured that I could stay in the nearby bookstore for a while. On the shelf of new books there the book was. I was attracted first by the sentence on the top cover: “How everything is connected to everything else and what it means for Business, Science and Everyday life”. I thought, “enn, this may be a fun book”. And it proved by itself it was.

I finished the first five or six chapters on the flight to San Diego in early June. The first several chapters talk about random graphs, social networks, Erdös number, six degree of separation, etc. All of those I have heard of elsewhere. Shown with a very lively tone by the book, I felt refreshed to revisit those ideas.

I didn’t continue until in the weekend of July 4^th when I stepped on a Chinatown bus from New York city to Boston to visit my boyfriend. I brought this book with me because I thought this could be an easy and relaxing book so I can kill the 4 hours’ boring time on the bus. The result is, I was amazed!

Starting from the 7^th chapter “Rich get richer”, new ideas behind what I’ve known begin to shine. Indeed, what is the topology of the Internet and World Wide Web? What makes the Internet scale so well? Why do we have such a huge collection of webpages and WWW doesn’t crash? How can computer virus spread so fast, nearly overnight? What takes AIDS 10 years to get out of Africa which then becomes a world-wide epidemic? How could the Asian financial crisis happen? How can Microsoft dominate the market of operating systems? What made Hotmail succeed and tons of other dot.coms didn’t? Can everyone become a millionaire by just putting something online and name it a fancy dotcom? This book gives the answer, and I was so convinced!

The four hours to me was like a journey to the wonderland. I constantly came to places where I experienced the joy of finding the treasure. I felt so excited. I smiled to other people on the bus unconsciously. If there were torture during the reading, it is to find out something so interesting and have nobody to share! So after I stepped off the bus, I couldn’t help telling my boyfriend everything I found out from the book, from biological systems to economical systems, from dotcom bubbles to communication systems, from energy crisis in California to the 911 attack. The very “network thinking” just crawls to every corner of the world. The excitement I had from this book is only comparable to what I experienced during the couple of days in my last year of college, when I read the translated version of the book “Complexity: the emerging science at the edge of order and chaos”, the first time I got to know this very novel and amazing new science – I agree with both authors that the 21^st century is gonna be the century of complexity!

The only drawback of this book is probably lack of enough technical details. But maybe for a book aiming at general public this is necessary. However, I couldn’t wait a single minute to dig out the first paper on “the power-law of scale-free networks”, which was published in Science, in the year of 1999. In fact, following the first paper, almost every step in the field of “scale-free networks” appeared in the most prestigious journals Science or Nature, while at the same time many scientific researchers have dreamed for years of getting that honor – The discovery deserves it! I believe the influence of the “network thinking” is deep enough to shake every scientific field, from physics to computer science, from biology to sociology.

What makes this book a lot of fun to read besides the a-million-dollar idea is the author’s succinct, precise and humorous way of writing. All-in-all, this $14 book is worth ten times more. By doing spectacular research and writing such a wonderful book, professor Albert-László Barabási successfully acquired one link from me and made one more step further towards a hub in the world of complexity. J

July, 9^th, 2003.