Networks—An Introduction. Mark E. J. Newman. (2010, Oxford University Press.) $65.38, £35.96 (hardcover), 772 pages. ISBN-978-0-19-920665-0.

Network science or graph theory has its roots in the first half of the 18th century when Leonhard Euler, a Prussian mathematician, analyzed the problem of finding a route through the city of Königsberg that crossed every one of the city's seven major bridges once and only once. Ever since then, network theory has attracted the interest of mathematicians like the famous Paul Erdős, who (together with Alfréd Rényi [2] and independently Gilbert [3]) was first to define random graphs in the late 1950s. Later, social scientists joined in founding social network theory as a new branch of the field. In the last two decades, an explosion of research into network science has been stimulated by the recent introduction of the small-world [4] and scale-free [1] network paradigms. As a result, the field has become ever more multidisciplinary, and concepts from network...