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.
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.
In times of war, secure communication can be the difference between life and death, or even winning or losing a war. The first to patent a rotor machine in Europe was Arthur Scherbius in 1918. Scherbius’ version of the rotor machine became a commercial success, unlike the other patented machines. Scherbius named his machine Enigma.
Recently there has been a breakthrough in the field of algorithms for geometric network problems, concerning the complexity of the Euclidean Travelling Salesman Problem.
