Networked - The Amazing World of Networks, From Cells to the Internet

Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo

"The world is small", we usually say when it turns out that in some way or another we have something to do with an apparent stranger. The world is small indeed, as the six billion members of mankind all know each other in a relational distance of just a few steps. Just as in human society, everything is connected with everything in the world, being parts of a complex and all-encompassing network. The very basis of our existence is a complex molecular network in our cells; our communication is carried by the telephone network, and we find information on the World Wide Web. In recent years, the theory of networks gave us some really surprising discoveries: it turned out that the majority of networks appearing in both nature and society is more similar than we had ever hoped, and their behaviour can be described with a handful of simple laws. The understanding of these laws have fundamentally changed our approach to quite a few important phenomena around us, including the origin of micro-worlds, the vulnerability of networks, and the nature of cancer. The presentation outlines the science of network research and the extremely wide range of its applications.

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