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One outstanding path from A to B

Nature Physics volume 17, page 540 (2021)Cite this article

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What does it mean for an individual to be ‘important’ or for a connection to be ‘outstanding’? The answer depends on context, as Sarah Shugars and Samuel V. Scarpino explain.

Psychologist Kurt Lewin understood the subtlety of the troll’s power as early as 1938, when he wrote, “Sometimes the fastest connection is outstanding; at other times it is the cheapest connection, or the most pleasant, or the least dangerous.”1 Modern network scientists now measure importance using a milieu of different strategies designed to capture the ‘centrality’ of an individual or node. Perhaps the most intuitive of these measures is degree centrality: the more connections you have, the more important you are. But even a small number of ‘outstanding’ connections can make a node important as well, to which the troll and its betweenness centrality would attest.

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References

  1. Lewin, K. Contributions to Psychological Theory. The Conceptual Representation and the Measurement of Psychological Forces (Duke Univ. Press, 1938); https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/13613-000

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Data Science, New York University, New York, NY, USA

    Sarah Shugars

  2. Network Science Institute, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

    Samuel V. Scarpino

  3. Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, USA

    Samuel V. Scarpino

  4. Vermont Complex Systems Center, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA

    Samuel V. Scarpino

Authors
  1. Sarah Shugars
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  2. Samuel V. Scarpino
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Correspondence to Sarah Shugars or Samuel V. Scarpino.

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Shugars, S., Scarpino, S.V. One outstanding path from A to B. Nat. Phys. 17, 540 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-021-01222-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-021-01222-2

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