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We continue with number 4 of our top 10 most read article of the past two months! At number 4 our article Scale-free networks, a controversial topic solved by extreme mathematics written by Pim van der Hoorn from the Eindhoven University of Technology! It is also great to see that articles written in 2020 are still well visited! In 2016 a company calculated that the average number of followers in Twitter/X was about 707. Although this might already sound like a lot, it pales in comparison with the top Twitter/X users. There are currently more than 100 users that have more than ten million followers. Some, like Barack Obama or Katy Perry, even have more than one hundred million followers, which is roughly 140.000 times larger than the average. This phenomenon is studied by mathematicians using scale-free networks! https://lnkd.in/eRpbhfGV

First of all, the best wishes for 2025! We wish you a happy, healthy and productive new year. To start 2025 we have prepared a nice interview! In November 2024, the Kick-Off meeting for the mobility research program BeyondTheEdge: Higher-Order Networks and Dynamics took place at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU Amsterdam). The event marked the official start of the project! We were there to celebrate this start with the people involved, and seized the opportunity to interview with Christian Bick, Principal Investigator and Project Coordinator of BeyondTheEdgeMSCA! https://lnkd.in/e6GF3j8q

On the 16th of October, mathematician Jan-Willem van Ittersum, who completed his PhD in 2021 at Utrecht University, was awarded the Christiaan Huygens Science Prize. To celebrate this occassion I asked Jan-Willem to arrange an interview for the Dutch magazine Nieuw Archief voor Wiskunde. We had a wonderful discussion both about the content of his research and about the importance of fundamental research. Jan-Willem's research is about partitions of numbers, a very important concept in modern research in mathematics. If you want to have a glimpse into his research then you can read the interview below. Research into partitions of numbers has a long history, with the first breakthroughs dating back to Leonard Euler around 1750. This means that modern research results about this simple concept are rather abstract and may seem inaccessible at first glance, but we tried to make the interview accessible and interesting even for the readers not interested in the technical details. KNAW - Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen

It is almost Christmas, schools have closed and you are looking for our Christmas-reads! You may not expect it but we have a Christmas-read ready for you. Have a look at our article, A Santa Claus network, written by Clara Stegehuis some time ago! https://lnkd.in/eN4_jMtp

The whole series is online, in these three articles Frank P. Pijpers wrote about logistic chains and discussed their new research results published in Nature Physics. In part 1 you can read an introduction into logistic chains and how small buffers can lead to global problems. In part 2 you can read about the mathematics behind logistic chains and the research of Frank and his colleagues. In part 3 Frank wrote some personal ideas about interdisciplinary research, the importance of collaboration, and of broad funding in fundamental research! Part 1: https://lnkd.in/dpyTGzb8 Part 2: https://lnkd.in/etNaBk9t Part 3: https://lnkd.in/etNaBk9t

In the first article of this series Frank P. Pijpers described how logistic chains work. He also talked about the ”just-in-time” model, and he discussed the phenomenon that small delays can have cascading effects when we schedule the whole process in an optimal way. The main idea is that the system can't absord such small delays. In this second part, he goes one step further and dives in the mathematics. https://lnkd.in/e42PZCV8

We continue with number 5 of our top 10 most read article of the past two months! At number 5 our article Percolation theory: about math and gossip, which was also published in the Dutch magazine Euclides Nederlandse Vereniging van Wiskundeleraren (NVvW) for mathematics teachers! Percolation theory is a branch of mathematics at the interface between probability theory and graph theory. The term 'percolation' originates from materials science. A representative question (and the source of the name, from Latin percolare, "to filter" or "drip through") is as follows. Suppose some liquid is poured over a porous material. Will the liquid be able to make its way from hole to hole and reach the bottom? https://lnkd.in/eTBp9dwC

Think of a local car dealer selling cars in your region. To make sure new cars are delivered on time a whole mechanism involving various people, factories, and transport companies, must operate in coordination. This is a highly complex process where mathematics plays an important role. In our new article, Frank P. Pijpers from the Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek and UvA Faculty of Science, wrote about their new research recently published in Nature Physics! Part 1 is online, have a look. https://lnkd.in/dpyTGzb8

Great news, in total 20 researchers from Dutch universities are awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant. Among them mathematicians David Holmes from Leiden University with his project "Enumerative and Arithmetic Geometry of Logarithmic curves" and Jasper Nederlof from Utrecht University with his project "Combinatorially and Algebraically Decomposing Search spaces: Better Worst-case Bounds for Hard Search Tasks". Congratulations to all these researchers for this great achievement!

We continue with number 6 of our top 10 most read article of the past two months! Tales of the Tails: (Not so) mysterious Heavy Tail worldbeyond the Bell Curve, by Agnieszka Janicka from the Eindhoven University of Technology! The scientific world would not be what it is today without the normal distribution. It is the foundation of many statistical models for several good reasons. Most importantly, it appears commonly in nature.  But there is much more! Climb with us beyond the Bell Curve as we unravel the marvels of heavy tails in this exciting journey. https://lnkd.in/e37cabKm