This chapter gives a brief overview of selected applications of graph theory, many of which gave rise to the development of graph theory itself. A range of such applications extends from puzzles and games to serious scientific and real-life problems, thus illustrating the diversity of applications. The first section is devoted to the six earliest applications of graph theory. The next section introduces so-called scale-free networks, which include the web graph, social and biological networks. The last section describes a number of graph-theoretic algorithms, which can be used to tackle a number of interesting applications and problems of graph theory.
Special Issue on Algorithms and Models for the Web Graph
