Friday, June 19, 2009

Graaaaaaaaaaaaaaphs

This might be one of the best xkcd comic strips ever. Wow!

I approve!

(Tip of the cap to Justin Howell.)

8 comments:

Lemming said...

I had that left open in a tab, and was going to get around to bringing it to your attention sometime this weekend (unless, of course, I forgot).

How can I read a comic like that without thinking of you?

Mason said...

Indeed! It's definitely no surprise that I really like that one.

GFreak said...

Awesome.
This would have been meaningless to me until about a week ago.

I'm currently teaching myself random graph theory via Bollobas' 1985 book and a paper by Albert and Barabasi (Statistical Mechanics of Complex Networks, 2001).

When I came to your talk at Duke a few months ago, I didn't realize how applicable the topic would be to my research!

Mason said...

There is a 1998 updated edition of the Bollobas book. (Actually, I specifically have that book on my purchase list. I need to get it while Springer books are still on sale. I tried to buy it a couple of weeks ago, but the store I checked was out, so I'll need to order it online.)

The AB paper is from 02. :) If you want to get a broader view of that stuff from the physics point of view, I recommend Mark Newman's 2003 article.

How is this stuff showing up in your research? That sounds really neat and quite a different application than usual.

GFreak said...

Thanks for the suggestions!

The A-B paper was published in '02, you're right -- but I got it from ArXiv, to which it was submitted in '01. That's the date on my copy, so that's what I went with.

GFreak said...

Is the "updated version" you refer to Modern Graph Theory, published in 1998 (and apparently revised in 2002)?
I am using Random Graphs from 1985 right now.

Mason said...

Yeah, it does look like there are two different books. A lot of stuff has been done on random graphs since 1985, much of which built on a seminal 1995 paper.

GFreak said...

I can't find the newer edition in the Duke libraries, but did pick up Modern Graph Theory (by Bollobas), an entry in the Springer Graduate Texts in Mathematics.