PageRank has been rediscovered for 50 years

vigna writes: A recent post on Slashdot argued that PageRank, the algorithm original developed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998 to rank web pages in Google, has a precursor in Leontief's input-output economic theory (1941). The link, however, is very weak, as Leontief is just interested in a pricing that makes an economy stable. Much more surprising is that Seeley in 1949 proposed to rank children popularity recursively, using their reciprocal "I-like" relationships, exactly as PageRank does. Wei in 1952 proposed to rank sport teams in the same way using the score of matches as "I'm-better-then" relationships, and Katz defined in 1953 its famous social index, which is exactly PageRank modulo a matrix normalization. The mathematics of all these contributions has been unified in a recent paper that tries to show how spectral ranking has been rediscovered over, over, and over for more than 50 years.