Summary
In this chapter, we began by introducing the ideas of graphs, directed graphs, networks, and directed networks along with some common language used to describe them. Next, we introduced a few ways in which these structures are used for modeling practical problems, many to be investigated more deeply in the forthcoming chapters.
After this, we moved on to consider ways in which graphs and networks can be stored in computer memory with Python. Especially popular are adjacency matrices and adjacency lists for graphs and weight matrices for networks. In the last section, we showed many features of graphs from adjacency matrices, such as degrees of vertices, the number of paths between pairs of vertices, and the length of the minimum-edge paths between the vertices.
Altogether, this chapter has defined graphs, trees, networks, and the directed types of these structures, established some common vocabulary on these topics, familiarized you with some practical applications of...
