Customer Reviews

Complex Graphs and Networks (CBMS Regional Conference Series in Mathematics)

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I am new to graph theory, pursue it as a hobby, write test applications in C#/.NET while struggling to understand theory with pencil and paper. I am very interested in understanding both generalizations of Erdos-Renyi graphs and spectral theory, and this book together with what you might call Fan Chung's companion book Spectral Graph Theory are a great basis for learning the ropes. I particularly appreciate the authors taking the time and space to explain the broader picture and the intuitive implications of theorems, a welcome divergence from the common practice of theorem-proof-theorem-proof ad nauseum. I highly recommend this book as both enjoyable and exciting to read!

The book summarizes recent developments in random graph theory, in particular the scale-free networks and small world networks, but classical Erdos-Renyi model is also covered. Many chapters have interesting introductions giving a brief historical background on the presented topic, followed by a series of rigorous proofs. There are numerous examples which relate the presented results to the real world empirical data, giving the reader further motivation to go through the mathematics. This book is certainly a "must have" item to anyone interested in modern graph theory and recent developments in the discipline.

The presence of large scale graphs in this set of lectures doesn't really remedy the lack of lower scale pattern matrices/ graphs? This book is better than the ten year earlier Spectral Graph Theory (CBMS Regional Conference Series in Mathematics, No. 92) by Fan Chung alone.
Both are dry and near the bone in exposition, but I wish I had bought this one instead of the former.
Since Fan Chung seems to have not learned or done a lot in the ten years between, I put the difference to the co-author.
It is a crying shame and I really feel bad for a genius like Fan Chung to be so dry and uninspired on such an important subject as this.
There is so much more involved in complex graph theory than the dry bones presented in these texts.
Don't approach this text with a faint heart or a lack of will.