The Mysterious R explained in simple terms
During the Corona pandemic the reproduction number 
appeared in much of the media. While it is not at all obvious what this quantity measures exactly, it is obvious that making it smaller than 1 really is crucial in controlling the spread of the virus. So what is this really?
Scale-free networks, a controversial topic solved by extreme mathematics
In 2016 a company calculated that the average number of followers in Twitter was about 707. Although this might already sound like a lot, it pales in comparison with the top Twitter users. There are currently more than 100 users that have more than ten million followers. Some, like Barack Obama or Katy Perry, even have more than one hundred million followers, which is roughly 140.000 times larger than the average.
How the popular become even more popular
Many networks, from technological to social networks, and from the world-wide web to collaboration networks, have a hub-like structure. Why is this the case, and why are they not much more homogeneous?
Interview with Onno Boxma
On Friday 11 October I went to Eindhoven for an interview with Onno Boxma. Onno became a professor of stochastic operations research in 1998 in Eindhoven Technical University, since 2018 he is an emeritus professor.
How uncertainty can make traffic run smoother
In 2014, in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, the average person spend approximately 40 hours in a traffic jam - that is 5 work days! In this article, I will explain how mathematical models with uncertainty help traffic engineers to make decisions that improve traffic.
Contest: How fast can you travel around the Netherlands?
. Suppose you are coming to the Netherlands for the first time, you want to enjoy your time in the country in the best possible way and probably visit and see as much as possible. So you rend a car and you decide to travel around. But now the challenge begins, planning such a trip!
A Tribute to All the Forgotten Women Scientists
I recently discovered a very interesting website, it is called the Quantum Universe. While browsing through the various articles I encountered a series of articles that triggered my interest.
Google PageRank: how search engines `bring order to the Web'
A crucial innovation of Google was a mathematically quite simple but powerful algorithm called PageRank.
Attacking complex problems using preprocessing
A lot of services that we enjoy every day, for example commuting by train or ordering some product from a web-shop, give rise to very complex problems, like making the daily train schedule or deciding how all the products that have been ordered should be delivered. How can we efficiently solve such problems? In this article I will explain how a method called preprocessing works.
A look into NETWORKS
When we wrote the grant application for NETWORKS, back in 2013, we obviously put all our energy into it, and tried to come up with the best proposal possible.