Seminar Details
2017-03-14 (14:00) : The structure of complex networks
At Euler building (room A.002)
Organized by Mathematical Engineering
Speaker :
Remco van der Hofstad (TU Eindhoven)
Abstract :
Many phenomena in the real world can be phrased in terms of networks. Examples include the World-Wide Web, social interactions, traffic and Internet, but also the interaction patterns between proteins, food webs and citation networks.
The large-scale networks have, despite their diversity in backgrounds, surprisingly much in common. Many of these networks are small worlds, in the sense that one requires few links to hop between pairs of vertices. Also the variability of the number of connections between elements tends to be enormous, which is related to the scale-free phenomenon.
In this lecture for a broad audience, we describe a few real-world networks and some of their empirical properties. We also describe the effectiveness of abstract network modeling in terms of graphs and how real-world networks can be modeled, as well as how these models help us to give sense to the empirical findings. We continue by discussing some random graph models for real-world networks and their properties, as well as their merits and flaws as network models. We conclude by discussing the implications of some of the empirical findings on competition on such networks.