Graphs

I'm a computer scientist, and I call the (very old) study of graphs "graph theory". How is "network theory" different?<p>And is it just me, or is it painful to read this? It has the feel of a student taking an intro course on optimization, then exclaiming, "everything is an optimization problem!" I mean, sure, this is true, but it's tautological and feels forced to me.<p>And sorry, but Twitter's main innovation was discarding symmetry? People have been subscribing (an asymmetric relation) to things on the internet and otherwise for ages.

&#62;"One of Twitter’s central innovations was to discard symmetry: you can follow someone without them following you."<p>Apparently Twitter rebranded the concept of a hyperlink.<p>&#62;"I expect we’ll look back on the next few years as the golden age of graph innovation."<p>I would say that the 'golden age of graph innovation' began much before this. Which is why in Computer Science, as he describes, we have a special edition of graph theory named 'network theory'. I wonder what that's for!

I've definitely noticed a trend towards graph based thinking in recent computer science publications. My half baked theory on this is as follows:<p>Graph based thinking is a result of the rise of social networking. The term "social network" wasn't common until I was a senior in college. Back then most computer scientists thought of things in terms of matrices - rows and columns. After 2004 when facebook became the most popular software in the college universe, people became much more interested in graphs (social and otherwise). I believe this lead many young computer scientists to start thinking in terms of graphs - vertices and edges. If you read comp sci papers written by people over the age of 30, many of them still express things in terms of matrices.<p>In my understanding, graphs can be faster to process and in many cases easier to traverse. But I believe that the shift in thinking has more to do with popular trends in software than it does any technical advantage of graphs over other ways of thinking.

The idea of graphs is a very old and very interesting topic for mathematicians too. See <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Bridges_of_K%C3%B6nigsberg" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Bridges_of_K%C3%B6nigsber...</a>