How do we determine the important characters in a movie like
Frozen? We can watch it, of course, but there are also other
ways—using mathematics and computers—to see who is important
in the social network of a story. The idea is to compute numbers
called centralities, which are ways of measuring who is important in
social networks. In this paper, we talk about how different types of
centralities measure importance in different ways. We also discuss
how people use centralities to study many kinds of networks,
not just social ones. Scientists are now developing centrality
measures that also consider changes over time and different types
of relationships.