History
The Wiener index is named after Harry Wiener, who introduced it in 1947; at the time, Wiener called it the "path number". It is the oldest topological index related to molecular branching. Based on its success, many other topological indexes of chemical graphs, based on information in the distance matrix of the graph, have been developed subsequently to Wiener's work.
The same quantity has also been studied in pure mathematics, under various names including the gross status, the distance of a graph, and the transmission. The Wiener index is also closely related to the closeness centrality of a vertex in a graph, a quantity inversely proportional to the sum of all distances between the given vertex and all other vertices that has been frequently used in sociometry and the theory of social networks.
Read more about this topic: Wiener Index
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1874–1945)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)