We present a non-conventional approach for studying the distribution of wealth in society. We analyze data from the 1996 Forbes 400 list of the richest people in the US. Our results confirm that wealth is distributed according to a power law. The measured exponent of the power-law is 1.36. As...

While a great deal is known about the topology of social networks, there is much less agreement about the geographical structure of these networks. The fundamental question in this context is: how does the probability of a social link between two individuals depend on the physical distance...

The “gravitational law of social interaction”, by which the probability of a social link decreases inversely with the square of the geographic distance, has been recently documented. The source of this spatial property of social networks, however, is yet unknown. The formation of social...