Traffic congestion is a huge problem in urban areas nowadays, road networks are becoming rather complicated to design and extending the network is not always possible. But the, seemingly innocent and quite natural, idea to build more roads in order to solve the traffic problem can be sometimes quite a bad idea.
Of course when you build more roads you also give people incentives to use their cars more often because there is more infrastructure available. But that is not the only concern, adding an extra road, which may seem like a shortcut, will redistribute the traffic in the road network. Braess' paradox says that this redistribution of the traffic flow may lead to a larger average travel time! Want to learn more? Then watch this short video (also in Dutch).
If you want to read more about Braess paradox and the math behind it you can have a look at this article.
Rapid urbanization without consideration for the environment is currently threatening urban dwellers. Its effects are exacerbating climate change and the urgency to adapt to our circumstances is growing. Network science may just have the key to solving our multifaceted problems.
Have you ever found yourself less popular when compared to your friends? Interestingly, in any group of individuals, on average, people have fewer friends than their friends do, or at the very most, an equal number. Not more!
Say you are living in Eindhoven and would like to spend a day in Amsterdam: what better way to get there than taking the train? Before your train departs, a whole logistic operation has taken place in the headquarters of the railway company to make this trip possible.
A conjecture of Erdős and Hajnal from 1989 says that forbidding any specific substructure results in existence of a very large homogeneous one! In this article you will have a look into one of the most fascinating problems in modern graph theory.
