Social networks can tell us something about the people in them. When somebody is in a difficult situation, they can use a little help from their friends. Who has the most friends in Frozen? That is difficult to tell just from watching the movie, but we can study another kind of social network—the network of who talks to whom. This network is not exactly the same as a friendship network, but it is much easier to accurately determine who talks to whom in the movie than it is to decide exactly who is friends with each other and how strong those friendships are. In this network of conversations, Anna speaks to nine people, so we will suppose that she has nine friends. Mathematicians say that Anna is a node in this network, that she has a degree of nine, and that those nine friends are her neighbors. Similarly, Elsa has a degree of eight, because she has eight friends; and Kristoff has a degree of six. Calculating somebody's degree is one way to measure their importance, but there are also many other ways.

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