Chapter 1 will explain what this book is about. Here I will explain why I chose to write the book, how it is written, when and where the work was done, and who helped.

Why. It would make a good story if I was inspired to write this book by an image of Paul Erdös magically appearing on a cheese quesadilla, which I later sold for thousands of dollars on eBay. However, that is not true. The three main events that led to this book were (i) the use of random graphs in the solution of a problem that was part of Nathanael Berestycki's thesis; (ii) a talk that I heard Steve Strogatz give on the CHKNS model, which inspired me to prove some rigorous results about their model; and (iii) a book review I wrote on the books by Watts and Barabási for the Notices of the American Math Society.

The subject of this book was attractive for me, since many of the papers were outside the mathematics literature, so the rigorous proofs of the results were, in some cases, interesting mathematical problems. In addition, since I had worked for a number of years on the properties of stochastic spatial models on regular lattices, there was the natural question of how the behavior of these systems changed when one introduced long-range connections between individuals or considered power law degree distributions.