A Networked World

Just over a decade ago, in June 1998, a curious three-page paper appeared in Nature. In it, the authors - two applied mathematicians - reported a link between the structure of the US electrical grid and the wiring of a nematode worm's neural system. They also noted that these patterns were strikingly similar in their structure to the social networks of Hollywood actors, one of the few such networks for which the authors could find extensive data. It is hard to imagine a more bizarre melding of topics in one study.