Abstract
‘Emergence of networks’ considers a range of network models that explain how local mechanisms, without global planning, can generate large-scale, complex, ordered, and efficient structures. The mechanisms discussed are preferential attachment, the Matthew effect, the richer-get-richer mechanism, the Barabási–Albert model, and the fitness model. Examples from the Internet, the WWW, genetic networks and social networks are used. The range of possible network dynamics is extremely wide: network scientists have made measures, mathematical models, and computer simulations in order to grasp the basic mechanisms underlying network creation, in the hope of understanding the principles of self-organization of these networks.
