ABSTRACT
The analysis of social networks has revealed many properties about the way that humans, and human groups, operate and interact. Social networks exist at many different scales: within a single organization, in a town, or within a country; and they are of different sizes, from a few dozen individuals to several billion. There are some examples of the properties of human social networks that emerge from the way that individual connections are made. Any social network analysis that lumps all of these multifaceted ways in which humans interact into a single generic category of "relationship" must surely miss important subtleties in the resulting structures. Social networks are usually modelled as graphs. A graph consists of a set of nodes and a set of edges. Adjacency matrices allow most kinds of social networks to be represented, and the machinery of linear algebra can be used to manipulate them, and to prove theorems about their properties.
