Mark Newman, School of Information, University of Michigan

Epidemics, Erdos numbers, and the Internet: The complex structure of networks in the real world

There is a long tradition of the study of graphs and networks in mathematics and computer science, but recent years have witnessed a major shift in the field with the new availability of large-scale data on real-world networked systems, including computer networks, information networks, social networks, and biological networks. Many of these, it turns out, have surprising structural properties that are both important for their function and inspire new theories of network topology, formation, and behavior. This talk will give a gentle introduction to this field, its methods and models, and discuss some of the intriguing mathematical questions it raises.