In this workshop, I try to present in a comprehensive manner, the state of the art on the study of social networks.

The student will be provided the main tools that are commonly used to measure networks as well as the main models that can explain how such networks came to be formed.

The main pieces of work we will refer to come from the field of statistical physics and from the recent papers on networks in the field of theoretical economics. The originality of the economic approach is that it considers the strategic formation of social networks.

At the end of the workshop, I shall present some results of a personal work which intends to show that the strategic approach can explain the formation of real & complex networks based on co-invention data.