Canonical · Network Theory · Paper

Power Laws & Scale-Free Networks

Albert-László Barabási · 1999

"Barabási showed many real networks — the web, actor collaborations, protein interactions — are scale-free: a few hubs have vastly more links than average, following a power law produced by preferential attachment, not by bell-curve randomness."

The idea

Barabási mapped the web in 1999 expecting a bell curve and found a power law instead: a handful of pages have millions of links, most have almost none.

Why it works

The takeaway — recall it first

Metcalfe's Law

"A network's value grows roughly with the square of its users, which is why the first users of a network are the hardest to get and the last are nearly free."

Robert Metcalfe · ModelContinue→