networking

the concept of networking gets thrown around a lot. I think the importance of it is often lost in the throw-away phraseology. it is not an accident that this word also applies to other things. namely, collections with many individual parts, put in relation to one another. there are networks of: computers, roads, rivers, ecological interactions, economic flows, family trees, electricity, gene interactions, and the ever-popular social networks.

there’s a core mathematical abstraction underlying all of these things, that being the graph (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_(discrete_mathematics)). graphs decompose networks into nodes and edges. nodes are the things in the network, while edges are the connections between those things. this is the very essence of pattern languages, moving between levels of specificity, from specific to general, and then back down from general to specific. all of the aforementioned specific cases of networks share this one general property: they can be modeled as graphs, and any conclusions that are true for graphs are also true (some interpretation may be required) on any of these specific network cases. for instance, there are algorithms for finding the shortest path between two nodes in a network (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra%27s_algorithm).