Distinguished University Professorship Lecture | Networks of People, Places, and Information and What Physics Can Say About Them

Many features of the world around us can be represented as networks. There are social networks of friendship or acquaintance, infrastructure networks like the internet or the power grid, transportation networks of roads, railways or airline flights, networks of information like the world wide web, and many others. This lecture will introduce some of the rich history of the study of networks and discuss some of the remarkable advances of the last few years, when a combination of insights from physics, the social sciences, biology, mathematics, and computer science have come together to shed light on issues as diverse as the spread of disease, online dating, scientific collaboration, animal behavior, web search, and the very structure of human society.

BIO
Mark Newman received a Ph.D. in physics from Oxford University in 1991 and conducted postdoctoral research at Cornell University before taking a position at the Santa Fe Institute, a think-tank in New Mexico devoted to the study of complex systems. In 2002 he left Santa Fe for the University of Michigan, where he is currently the Anatol Rapoport Distinguished University Professor of Physics and a professor in the university's Center for the Study of Complex Systems. Among other honors, he is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Fellow of the American Physical Society, he has been a Simon's Foundation Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow, and was winner of the 2014 Lagrange Prize, the largest international prize for research on complex systems. He is the author of over 150 scientific publications and seven books, including "Networks", an introduction to the field of network theory, and "The Atlas of the Real World", a popular book on cartography.