During the previous months four blog-posts written by two members of NETWORKS have appeared on the Dutch science communication platform Wetenschap.nu. Three posts written by Frits Spieksma and one post written by Remco van der Hofstad.

Frits Spieksma, professor of combinatorial optimization at the TU Eindhoven, used together with his team all their creativity and knowledge to help with everyday problems that appeared due to the Corona health crisis. Their first two posts regard the problem that appeared during spring in many sports championships. Namely that a winner should be chosen while not all matches could be completed. The first post concerns the Dutch national football championship and the second concerns the Champions League. Their third article treats a totally different question, namely what is the optimal way to fill a theater hall given all the protective restrictions (like the 1.5m distance between the attendees). Theaters may be closed from tomorrow on but when they re-open this problem, and the solution of course, will be relevant again. 

The post of Remco van der Hofstad, professor of probability at the TU Eindhoven, regards a totally different topic, namely scale-free networks and how the Kevin Bacon game inspired mathematicians to study networks where this scale-free behavior appears. Scale-free networks have been in the spotlight since the 9os and has been the subject of many discussions in recent conferences. Read more about this topic in these two articles on the Network Pages, written by Remco van der Hofstad and Pim van der Hoorn.