Course Description
   

We are surrounded by systems that are hopelessly complicated. Consider for example the society that requires cooperation between billions of individuals, or communications infrastructures that integrate billions of cell phones with computers and satellites. These systems are collectively called complex systems, capturing the fact that it is difficult to derive their collective behavior from a knowledge of the system's components. Given the important role complex systems play in our daily life, in science and in economy, their understanding, athematical description, prediction, and eventually control is one of the major intellectual and scientific challenges of the 21st century.

The emergence of network science at the dawn of the 21st century is a vivid demonstration that science can live up to this challenge. Indeed, behind each complex system there is an intricate network that encodes the interactions between the system's components. The exploding interest in network science during the first decade of the 21st century is rooted in the discovery that despite the obvious diversity of complex systems, the structure and the evolution of the networks behind each system is driven by a common set of fundamental laws and principles. Therefore, notwithstanding the amazing differences in form, size, nature, age, and scope of real networks, most networks are driven by common organizing principles. Once we disregard the nature of the components and the precise nature of the interactions between them, the obtained networks are more similar than different from each other. In the following sections we discuss the forces that have led to the emergence of this new research field and its impact on science, technology, and society.