Albert-László Barabási – Network Science: From Abstract to Physical Networks

Meet up at Physics at the Library for a lecture about how network science is an indispensable tool from physics to medicine by Professor Albert-László Barabási, Northeastern University. Just about every field of research is confronted with networks. Metabolic and genetic networks describe how proteins, substrates and genes interact in a cell; social networks quantify the interactions between people in the society; the Internet is a complex web of computers; ecological systems are best described as a web of species. In all these fields the detailed knowledge of the components is insufficient to describe the whole system. Network science has led to the realization that despite the diversity of these systems, the underlying networks emerge and evolve following simple but generic laws, that are best unveiled using the toolset of statistical physics. As a result, today network science is an indispensable tool from physics to medicine, and its applications, ranging from epidemic control