In case you too ever wondered why networks of nodes and edges are called "graphs":
![Text From "The pioneering contributions of cayley and sylvester to the mathematical description of chemical structure"
"Of the 342 papers written by Sylvester during his lifetime, only two relate
directly to chemistry. Yet, these two papers, both of which appeared in 1878,
have proved to be of great importance in the evolution of mathematical chemistry. The first was a short note [20] published in Nature under the title
“Chemistry and Algebra”, and the second was a massive paper with three long
appendices [ 281 which appeared in the inaugural issue of the American Journal of Mathematics. In both these communications, Sylvester’s purpose was
to point out the many parallels that exist between chemistry and algebra. He
felt that the two disciplines were not nearly as antithetical to each other as
many had supposed, and that they could be harmonized by the use of an appropriate mathematical formalism. Sylvester proposed the introduction of a
common graphic notation which derived from his earlier work on invariant
theory. ... It is interesting to observe that in his papers
[ 20,281 Sylvester made the first use of the terms “chemicograph” and its shorter
cousin “graph” in his discussion of structural formulas. These terms clearly
derive from the “graphic notation” of the chemists of his time, the expression
then commonly used to denote the structural formula. The word graph is thus
of chemical origin, a fact not widely appreciated by either chemists or mathematicians today. "](https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/115/630/307/320/881/787/original/487e0a3e36b08a02.png)
In case you too ever wondered why networks of nodes and edges are called "graphs":
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