The road coloring conjecture was proved recently after almost four decades by an Israeli mathematician. The theorem states that given a finite number of roads, it is possible to draw a universal color-coded map that leads to a particular destination regardless of the point of origin. This is equivalent to saying there is a set […]

Have you ever gone to the movies and worried about who you’re going to sit next to?  This comic illustrates the common dilemma moviegoers face when filling the theatre aisles.

www.xkcd.com/173
The complex relationships between each pair of people in a group can be reflected in an acquaintance graph, such as the one shown above in the comic. […]

Ending in 2002, the lengthy anti-trust case against Microsoft illuminated current economic theories on imperfect competition and transaction costs, which involve game theory to analyze the behavior of companies. In classical economics, companies operating in a perfectly competitive environment have no influence over the price, which is determined entirely by market factors. Most industries are […]

At the beginning of the semester we were given a sheet depicting numerous real life models of a variety of social networks. Most of edges concerned interaction between nodes, such as the spread of informational e-mails, friendships within organizations and clubs, or the outbreak of a disease. This blog focuses on a more theoretical […]

https://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/daniel_finkelstein/article3399671.ece
http://findarticales.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_4_166/ai_n6151880/
In a recent article on the timesonline.co.uk website, game theory was related to the politics in relations to the Tories. In the article,game theory’s selfish strategies and cooperative strategies are discussed and an interesting point about vampire bats were mentioned. Upon some searching, I came across and article in Science News further explaining the example […]

On the Thursday evening when I should have been working on “Networks” Homework #3 I escaped with my wife to a performance at Ithaca College of “La Finta Giardiniera”, a comic opera written by Mozart when he was 18 years old.  But there in the program for the performance I found “Notes from the Director” consisting […]

In a study at Kansas University conducted by Michael Vitevich, an attempt is made to map out the words of our vocabulary as they are represented in the human brain. What Vitevich hopes to learn from charting out our vocabularies in the brain is how victims of brain trauma regain their language skills, but […]

        In this article, the author describes the entrance of a new competitor into the mobile market.  In particular, in Great Britain, a new company, Hutchison 3G has attempted to break into the ultra-competitive wireless communications industry.  However, as expected, they have had a considerable amount of difficulty persuading customers to leave their […]

In response to several blog posts earlier on this semester, describing our course’s broad application to biological networks (such as this one, this one, and this one) I highlight that Piers J Ingram, Michael PH Stump and Jaroslav Stark published research in 2006 demonstrating that network effects in biology are not only often poorly understood, but […]

Why do certain songs sound so good? Why are there simple tunes that are so catchy? How can we tell immediately that some sounds just don’t go well together? Of course, there are many factors that contribute to how music is interpreted by human ears, but much can be understood by seeing the networks behind […]