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What have Donald Trump, an epidemiologist and a rock in common?

In this article, dear reader, I am going to show you in which way the development of your opinion during the last political issue, the spread of a virus among your acquaintances during the current pandemic, and the alignment of some particles lying inside the device from which you are reading this article are extremely comparable phenomena.

The travelling salesman problem

Suppose you have a delivery service. You have one truck and have to deliver a large number of parcels to different cities in the country every day. Then you run into the following problem: in which order should you visit the cities?

How do you decide who is the most important?

Imagine you’re in a remote village and only have a limited number of vaccines to distribute to protect the community from a deadly virus, who do you vaccinate?

A difficult decision, but necessary. Assuming that the disease is just as deadly for everyone in the community, the best way to prevent deaths is to contain the spread of the virus.

Her Maths Story

There are so many interesting and inspiring initiatives trying to show how rich and beautiful the world of science is!

How many colors do you need to color a map?

A mathematician once told me that problems that are very simple to state can be very deceiving, and sometimes turn out to be extremely difficult to solve. One such problem was the Four Color Problem. 

The Network Science of Echo Chambers and Why It Matters

An echo chamber is a community wherein the same opinions are bounced around, endlessly ‘echoing’ with barely any change. And as they do, any other opinion is shunned, pushed aside, and eventually just rejected without consideration.

Getting back together

One of the crucial aspects of working together in a big consortium like NETWORKS is actually meeting each other now and then.