Albert-László Barabási discusses the science of networks, from its fundamental aspects, to its implications in biology. Barabási is distinguished professor of physics and the director of Northeastern University’s Center for Complex Networks Research.
Conversations about a life in science
Interesting. Both the apparent universality and lack of randomness of networks, and the more philosophical implications that an analysis of social networks, i.e, carry. COOL!
It is not true that everybody thought networks were random before his group looked at it (although their work clearly is very important). On the top of my head I can at least recall a work that dates back to 1994 which looked at similarities between river systems and networks, viz. Takako Yamada, Satoshi Nojo and Yukio Takahashi
“Horton´s and Strahler´s Laws (Natural Laws in River Networks) in Telecommunication Networks”. The bibtex entry reads:
@Inproceedings { yamada942,
title = {},
year = {1994},
pages = {1455-1464},
url = {fileadmin/ITCBibDatabase/1994/yamada942.pdf},
author = {Yamada, Takako and Nojo, Satoshi and Takahashi, Yukio}
}
Not only did everybody thought that networks are random but there was also existing literature showing that networks can have a power law degree distribution. See for example Derek de Solla Price’s work in 1965 on citation networks. He showed that these networks have power law distribution. Even more interesting is that in 1976 Price also provided a mechanism that give rise to power law distribution called and it is called “cumulative advantage”. Unfortunately this mechanism now bears the name “preferential attachment” given by Barabasi and Albert although it is essentially the same. It is wrong for Barabasi to claim that there was no literature on networks different from random networks when he essentially reinvented Price’s network model. By the way Price’s model is mathematically correct and Barabasi’s isn’t.
Interesting reflections not only about networks and mobility (the works in this area are very interesting) but also about what you can do where and time management.
Barabasi is exactly the physicist to make network connections. He quickly “connects the nodes” of any problem he is presented and does so on the cuff. It’s a dubious exercise to give credit for an idea though I believe Barabasi is just for praise. I read “Bursts” with a fellow NU undergraduate, I am physics – he is computer science. We both enjoyed it thoroughly. Thanks for the interview, good to see credit where credit is due.
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Has anyone else noticed this guy’s huge ego and his irronic obsession with the academic world as opposed to the real world? “ME, tenure, I did, the LITERATURE, grants, my article in Nature, my lab, etc. … “