How social networks help job seekers and hirers alike
Lots of research has gone into the nexus of social networks in the labour market. Our question is: Do students benefit from the connectedness of their advisers in terms of first academic employment after graduate school?
Centrality measures: who is the most important in a network?
In this article, we discuss several ways to quantify the importance of nodes in a network. We will discuss how a simple game can help study this special property, and how it can help us in cases like reducing fake news.
Eigenvalues to the rescue
On a quiet afternoon, professor Meth is working in her office in Leiden on some tantalizing mathematics problems. Suddenly, someone knocking on her door nervously disrupts the silence.
How do you decide who is the most important?
Imagine you’re in a remote village and only have a limited number of vaccines to distribute to protect the community from a deadly virus, who do you vaccinate?
A difficult decision, but necessary. Assuming that the disease is just as deadly for everyone in the community, the best way to prevent deaths is to contain the spread of the virus.
How the popular become even more popular
Many networks, from technological to social networks, and from the world-wide web to collaboration networks, have a hub-like structure. Why is this the case, and why are they not much more homogeneous?
Google PageRank: how search engines `bring order to the Web'
A crucial innovation of Google was a mathematically quite simple but powerful algorithm called PageRank.
Mathematical rulers in Game of Thrones
The moment millions of fans have waited for is there: the finale of Game of Thrones. 75 characters in different parts of the world, fighting to be the ruler of the iron throne. But who is the mathematical ruler of the iron throne?
Network analysis of tax treaties
Large international companies often do not send their profits directly from one country to another. Instead, they send it via other countries, so-called conduit countries, to reduce the tax they pay. Which countries are the most important conduit countries?