Admission requirements
The course is open to all third-year bachelor’s students of Leiden University and its LDE partners. No specific prerequisites are required. Students will acquire the necessary mathematical background and programming skills through the parallel course "Essentials of Mathematics, Data Science and Programming“.
Description
Networks play a key role in modeling social, biological, and technical systems. This course introduces the fundamental concepts of network science, providing students with essential tools to represent, describe, and analyze networks. The focus is on foundational graph theory concepts, basic structural properties, and elementary computational methods to study networks. The course serves as a gateway to understanding more advanced structural and dynamic properties explored in later courses.
Topics covered include different types of graphs (directed, undirected, weighted), fundamental measures (degree, paths, connectivity), and simple network models. Students will learn how to represent networks using adjacency matrices and lists, compute basic properties, and visualize network data.
Topics:
Graph representation (adjacency matrix, adjacency list)
Node and edge types (directed, undirected, weighted networks)
Basic graph properties: degree, path length, connectivity
Introduction to random graphs: Erdős-Rényi and other models
Basic network visualization and analysis techniques
Simple case studies from social, biological, and technological networks
Course objectives
Understand the basic representations and properties of networks.
Learn fundamental graph theory concepts relevant to network science.
Apply elementary computational methods to analyze small-scale networks.
Gain familiarity with network visualization.
Develop a conceptual foundation for advanced network science courses.
Timetable
In MyTimetable, you can find all course and programme schedules, allowing you to create your personal timetable. Activities for which you have enrolled via MyStudyMap will automatically appear in your timetable.
Mode of instruction
Lectures
Tutorial sessions (mostly in lectures)
Assessment method
We will have weekly homeworks or in-class quizzes. These will consitute to 25% of the final score. There will be a final written exam which will consititute to 75% of the final score. For the retake, there may be oral exams. There will be no retake for the homeworks or in-class quizzes.
Reading list
tbd
Registration
tbd
Contact
Moritz Otto (m.f.p.otto@math.leidenuniv.nl), Rajat Hazra (r.s.hazra@math.leidenuniv.nl).
Remarks
part of the minor Network Science for a Connected World