When diffusion depends on chronology
Monday, July 15, 2013 - 11:00
in Mathematics & Economics
The Internet, motorways and other transport systems, and many social and biological systems are composed of nodes connected by edges. They can therefore be represented as networks. Scientists studying diffusion over such networks over time have now identified the temporal characteristics that affect their diffusion pathways. In a paper about to be published in European Physical Journal B, Renaud Lambiotte and Lionel Tabourier from the University of Namur, Belgium, together with Jean-Charles Delvenne from the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, show that one key factor that can dramatically change a diffusion process is the order in which events take place in complex networks.