László Lovász: The mathematics of very large networks
Time: Wed 2014-05-14 18.00 - 19.00
Location: The Beijer Hall, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Lilla Frescativägen 4A, Stockholm
Participating: László Lovász, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary
Many of the most interesting structures of our world can be modeled by large networks. The internet is perhaps the foremost example. Various social networks (several of them created by the internet) are studied by sociologist, historians, epidemiologists, and economists. Huge networks arise in biology (from ecological networks to the brain), physics, and engineering. These networks pose challenging new problems for the mathematician. Which questions about large networks are meaningful at all? How to obtain information about them? How to model them? How to approximate them by smaller networks so that basic properties are preserved? How to run algorithms on such huge graphs? The talk will sketch a theory of large networks, based on joint work with C. Borgs, J. Chayes, V.T. Sós, B. Szegedy and K. Vesztergombi.
László Lovász was born in 1948 in Budapest, Hungary. He obtained his doctoral degree in mathematics from the Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest, Hungary) in 1971. He is Professor at the Eötvös Loránd University. He served as the President of the International Mathematical Union (2007-2010). His field of research is discrete mathematics and the theory of computing. He published 9 books and over 250 research papers. His awards include the Wolf Prize (1999) and the Kyoto Prize (2010).
The lecture is free of charge and open to the public. Registration is not needed.