A number of art museums around the country have been featuring work by an artist
named Mark Lombardi (1951 2000), consisting of a set of intricately rendered graphs.
Building on a great deal of research, these graphs encode the relationships among
people involved in major political scandals over the past several decades: the nodes
correspond to participants, and each edge indicates some type of relationship between
a pair of participants. And so, if you peer closely enough at the drawings, you can
trace out ominous-looking paths from a high-ranking U.S. government official, to a
former business partner, to a bank in Switzerland, to a shadowy arms dealer.
Such pictures form striking examples of social networks, which have nodes representing
people and organizations, and edges representing relationships of various kinds.
And the short paths that abound in these networks have attracted considerable attention
recently, as people ponder what they mean. In the case of Mark Lombardi’s
graphs, they hint at the short set of steps that can carry you from the reputable to the
disreputable.
Of course, a single,