We've been talking about examples of networks in many different domains

and how networks are really pervasive in a lot of different applications--

in science and in society and in everyday life.
And so now, it's useful, to talk about them further,
to begin delving into the mathematical definitions around them.
So to start out, if we want to talk about networks,
then we need the language of graph theory--
the study of how things are connected and what those connections imply.
So a graph is simply the mathematical term
for the object that represents a network.
A graph consists of two things-- a set of nodes,
which are the objects that we're going to connect,
and then the edges, which are things that connect certain pairs of nodes.
So for example, in a social network, the people could be the nodes.
Those are the things being connected in the social network.
And then the friendships are the edges.
So if two people are friends, we say there's an edge between them.
So certain things in a graph have edges connecting them,
and certain other things don't.
To make this more concrete, let's try drawing an example.
And let's pick something that's actually small enough and self-contained so we
can actually look at it and play around with it.
So this won't be a social network.
This will actually be a physical communication network.
It's actually the internet from late 1970.
So the internet was quite young in 1970.
And it was a bit smaller back then than it is today.
In particular, it actually only had 13 nodes.
So the internet in late 1970 was architected as basically these two
rings.
There was an east coast ring with 6 nodes.
It had a mix of research universities and government-funded labs.
So on the east coast, there was MIT.
There was Harvard.
There was Case Western.
Those Carnegie Tech, which later became Carnegie Mellon.
And there were these labs, BBN and Lincoln Labs.
And the west coast was a similar mix of labs and research universities.
There was Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, UCLA, and Utah,
and then labs drawn here as SRI, SDC, and RAND.
OK.
13 nodes-- and that's all there was.
And there were edges.
There were edges between certain pairs of them.
So for example, you see here that MIT was connected to BBN.
Harvard was connected to BBN.
Those were relatively local links.
And then there were these very long range links-- MIT out
to Utah, BBN out to RAND-- that crossed much of the country.
And these links were actually, in a sense, physical objects.
When you put a packet in at MIT and it had to get to Utah,
it actually went down physical cable and came out
the other side of the computer that was at Utah.
So these were, at some level, computers wired together
with physical infrastructure, taking advantage of, of course,
all sorts of other complicated infrastructure,
other national communication networks like the phone system, which
existed at the time, but definitely a network
in and of itself with these 13 nodes.
And when you look at it, you can appreciate
some of the connectivity and this idea that there were these two rings
and they had these two long haul links.
And that all comes through when you draw the picture of the 13 node
internet in 1970.
one Thing that also is important to appreciate is when you draw a network
or you draw a graph like this, all that matters is what's connected to what.
It doesn't matter where I put the nodes.
In particular, they're drawn here purely to look good, to be conceptually clear.
But I could have drawn them some other way.
And in particular, for example, although the east coast and west coast rings
are suggestive, if you think about the geography of the United States,
this is not actually other they're laid out on a map.
So for example, the East Coast ring-- you would actually
have to fold over to put Case and Carnegie to the west of MIT, BBN,
and Harvard.
OK.
So really, what matters is the connectivity.
Now, what I wanted to do here is talk a little bit
about some of the basic definitions around graphs.
And we can illustrate these definitions with the graph that we have here.
And I'm going to run through four or five definitions.
And they're going to be the bedrock of what
we're going to be talking about-- the language we're
going to use when we think about graphs.
Maybe the most basic definition that we're going to use
is the idea of a path.
So when I look at a network, the obvious question that you should ask yourself
is how do I get from point A to point B if it's a communication network
or transportation network.
That's the question that comes to mind.
The internet was there to send data from a computer at one place
to a computer at another place.
And so, for example, if I wanted to get from the internet node at Lincoln Labs
to the one at RAND, I could say, how should I
get there in a sequence of hops?
So a packet Lincoln could go, for example, through MIT, then onto Utah,
through SDC, and down to RAND.
And that would be a four step path that would get me there.
We'll say that a graph is connected if there's
a path between each pair of nodes.
And certainly, if you have a communication network,
the goal would be for it to be connected.
You want to be able to get from anywhere to anywhere.
And we'll also talk about the lengths of paths.
Some paths might be better than others because they're shorter, for example.
And so we if number of hops is our objective,
the thing we we're really seeking to improve, then, for example, if we were
to go from Lincoln Labs to RAND via MIT, Utah, SDC-- so that's four edges--
we'll say that that's a path of length four.
The length will be the number of edges it contains.
And if you look for a second, you'll notice
that's actually not the shortest path from Lincoln to RAND.
If we wanted the path of minimum possible length,
we should take a different route through this-- Lincoln to MIT to BBN onto Rand.
And that's only three edges.
So that has a length of three.
And if you look a little more closely-- you look at Lincoln
and RAND-- you'll notice there is no two edge path between them.
You can just try that out.
And so, in fact, Lincoln, MIT, BBN to RAND
is actually the shortest path between them.
And so that defines the natural notion of distance on our graph.
We'll say that the distance between two nodes
is the length of the shortest path from one to the other.
And so again, we have to remember that length here
and distance really means in the number of hops that you take in the network.
It's not a physical or geographic concept.
And so in particular, Lincoln and RAND are pretty far apart.
They're on opposite coasts of the US.
But in the graph, they're a distance of three, in the same way
that, say, Lincoln and Harvard are much closer
to each other-- they're both in the Northeast US--
and yet, because they're on opposite sides of that six node ring,
they too have a distance of three.
So a distance of three on the graph could be very different from distance
in the physical world.
There's one last definition that's useful to talk about,
which is if a graph is not connected, then
we'd like to understand the ways in which it breaks apart
into separate pieces.
So imagine, for example, we have this 13 node internet
and we're thinking about the idea that links might fail, for example.
And that's certainly something that you worry
about when you build a communication network.
So a construction crew starts taking up a sidewalk to work on the water system,
for example.
And they might accidentally cut through some gigantic telecommunications cable
and actually remove an edge from some communication network.
Now, if you look at this 13 node internet,
people were clearly thinking about that, because-- you can try it out.
If you were to destroy any one edge in this graph,
the graph would actually still be connected.
There's always another way to go.
Even across the country, there were these two ways.
There's MIT to Utah and there's BBN to RAND.
But of course, if you actually were to lose both of those long haul links,
for example, the graph would fall apart.
And the two things it falls apart into we'll call connected components.
So when a graph is not connected, we're going to talk about its components.
And a component is a set of nodes with two important properties.
One is that the set of nodes is internally connected.
So if I were to look at it as just a graph in itself,
it would be a connected graph.
But it also has no edges to the rest of the graph.
So it's as big as it can be in the sense of being connected.
Everything else is somewhere else and is not linked by edges.
So in this graph in particular, if I were to remove those two cross country
links, we would have a six node connected component on the east coast
and a seven node connected component on the west coast.
So the ideal would be to take these basic vocabulary
items-- the notions like path, connected, length, distance,
component-- we're gonna take those, and those are going to our basic working
ingredients for reasoning about graphs in this first pass on them.
And so what we actually want to do next is
think about how can we take these ideas and start
thinking about graphs in a more abstract way, and in particular,
to get leverage on graphs that may be too big and too
complicated to simply draw and work out by hand.