Everything is connected to everything else

Albert-László Barabási / Photo: Szabolcs Csortos, UnivPécs

Frigyes Karinthy, the famous Hungarian writer can be considered as a forerunner of this field of science. His short story titled "Chainlinks" is about characters who believed that any two individuals could be connected through not more than five acquaintances. Karinthy suggested that despite great physical distances, the growing density of human networks made the actual social distance smaller. Karinthy has been regarded as the originator of the notion of the six degrees of separation, which asserts, that everyone is six or fewer steps away from anyone else in the world.

Another precursor was the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdõs, who liked to visit his colleagues and wrote papers together with a large number of them. His co-authors and friends created the Erdõs number which describes the "collaborative distance" between him and another person. This concept was applied to the Hollywood movie industry: that is how the Bacon Number has been revealed. The higher the Bacon Number, the farther away from Kevin Bacon the actor is. (There is only one person on the globe who has a Bacon Number of 0, Kevin Bacon himself.)

Albert-László Barabási researches the structure of networks, and has discovered the so-called scale-free network concept. The social networks and the networks in nature are more alike than they are different. This similarity can be used to describe their common patterns. He talked about the main models and their applications in many fields of actual life, such as the spread of epidemics, fighting against terrorism, handling economic crises. By the way, professor
Albert-László Barabási has a Bacon Number 1 and an Erdõs Number 3.

Source: UnivPécs