This interview is an episode from @The-Well, our publication about ideas that inspire a life well-lived, created with the @JohnTempletonFoundation.

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Our world is filled with an abundance of data. Albert-László Barabási, a network scientist, believes that understanding the underlying structure and relationships of complex systems is crucial. Barabási’s research has challenged the notion of random connections and led to the discovery of a more accurate representation of how these systems are organized.

Barabási’s exploration began with the vast internet. Surprisingly, he found that the intricate web of connections did not follow random patterns but instead followed a power load distribution. He named these networks “scale-free networks.”

Barabási’s groundbreaking work reveals that new connections in our networks tend to form with already well-connected elements. Scale-free networks exist in various complex systems, such as cellular interactions and social networks. This discovery is an important step toward comprehending the remarkable complexity that arises from countless interactions among the world’s many components.

0:00 Networks: How the world works
1:23 The theory of random graphs
3:15 What is network science?
6:49 Complex systems

Read the video transcript ► https://bigthink.com/the-well/decodin...

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About Albert-László Barabási:
Albert-László Barabási is a network scientist, fascinated with a wide range of topics, from unveiling the structure of the brain and treating diseases using network medicine to the emergence of success in art and how science really works. His research has helped unveil the hidden order behind various complex systems using the quantitative tools of network science, a research field that he pioneered, and has led to the discovery of scale-free networks, helping explain the emergence of many natural, technological, and social networks.

Barabási is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He is the author of The Formula (Little Brown), Network Science (Cambridge), Bursts (Dutton), and Linked (Penguin). He co-edited Network Medicine (Harvard, 2017) and The Structure and Dynamics of Networks (Princeton, 2005). His books have been translated into over twenty languages.

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