It is maybe a good time to have a break from articles, and to sit confortably and enjoy some nice videos!

During the past ten years we have spend quite some time with our colleagues from the NETWORKS team in developping animations and videos. A complete list of the animations can be found here. I would like to use this post to show you some videos that were made during this time. 

The following three videos were developped by the ICMS (Institute for Complex Molecular Systems) in Eindhoven. 

Complex networks

Many aspects in our daily life can be displayed as a network consisting of elements and the connections between them. This is explained in a playful manner in this video.

Friends influence each other in their opinion of many aspects of life. In this video we describe how the level of connectedness in a social network relates to the extent in which individuals in it influence each other.

Social networks are remarkably small, in the sense that you can hop between any two individuals in them using only a few hops. This video explains what such small-world networks are, why social networks are so small.

Friendship Paradox

On social media it seems like everyone around me is more popular than what I am. Thankfully, as a mathematician, I know what the reason is and that it is not because of me! It is a mathematical statement: the friendship paradox! This paradox states that your friends have on average more friends that what you do! This is rather conforting for my self image, but there is more to it. The friendship paradox can help us prevent the spreading of a disease!

But how does this exactly work? In the following animation, developed by Bruno van Wayenburg, we explain how this works!

Braess Paradox

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.

Want to read more? Have a look at this article about Braess' paradox.

Rescue Mission!

An ad hoc wireless network is a decentralized type of wireless network. See how these networks enable a self-regulating rescue!

All these videos can be found in our Youtube channel NETWORKS & The Network Pages. You can also find recordings from various lectures and the last three videos in Dutch. Any more videos we will develop will also appear in our channel, so follow us if you want to stay up to date!