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NetworkX

Python library for graphs and networks

  • 15 min read
  • 10 chapters

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Through Python (programming language), Graph (discrete mathematics) and SciPy

History

NetworkX began development in 2002 by Aric A. Hagberg, Daniel A. Schult, and Pieter J. Swart. It is supported by the National Nuclear Security Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The package was crafted with the aim of creating tools to analyze data and intervention strategies for controlling the epidemic spread of disease, while also exploring the structure and dynamics of more general social, biological, and infrastructural systems.

Inspired by Guido van Rossum's 1998 essay on Python graph representation, NetworkX made its public debut at the 2004 SciPy annual conference. In April 2005, NetworkX was made available as open source software.

Several Python packages focusing on graph theory, including igraph, graph-tool, and numerous others, are available. As of April 2024, NetworkX had over 50 million downloads, surpassing the download count of the second most popular package, igraph, by more than 50-fold. This substantial adoption rate could potentially be attributed to NetworkX's early release and its continued evolution within the SciPy ecosystem.

In 2008, SageMath, an open source mathematics system, incorporated NetworkX into its package and added support for more graphing algorithms and functions.

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