(Phys.org)—Do you know who Michael Jackson or George Washington
was? You most likely do: they are what we call "household names"
because these individuals were so ubiquitous. But what about
Giuseppe Tartini or John Bachar? That's much less likely, unless
you are a fan of Italian baroque music or free solo climbing. In
that case, you would have heard of Bachar just as likely as
Washington. The latter was popular, while the former was not as
popular but had interests similar to yours. A new paper
published this week in the science journal Nature by the
Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA),
based at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the
University of California, San Diego, explores the concept of
popularity versus similarity, and if one more than the other
fuels the growth of a variety of networks, whether it is the
Internet, a social network of trust between people, or a
biological network. The researchers, in a study called
Popularity Versus Similarity in Growing Networks, show