The results aren’t too surprising, given that Tyrion has the most point-of-view chapters in the book series, with 49. Characters don’t necessarily have to be friends to be linked-which is a good thing because there are few true friendships in the series. The links are weighted based on how often the two characters appeared in close proximity. Whenever two characters appeared within 15 words of one another, a link (or “edge”) was added between them. The pair started by connecting characters every time they “interacted” in the third book of the series, A Storm of Swords. “But it’s the kind of accessible application that shows what mathematics is all about, which is finding and explaining patterns.” Their research, entitled “Network of Thrones,” is published in the Mathematical Association of America’s publication, Math Horizons(pdf). “This is a fanciful application of network science,” Beveridge told Quartz. The books and HBO fantasy series, with their massive cast of characters, various shifting allegiances, and intricate relationship dynamics, were a perfect fit to be studied mathematically. Beveridge, an associate professor of mathematics at Macalester College, and Jie Shan, an intrepid undergraduate, decided to turn the world of the Game of Thrones books into a social network using network science, a branch of applied graph theory that draws from several disciplines, including economics, sociology, and, computer science, to examine how information flows from one thing to another.
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