Albert-László Barabási
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Albert-László Barabási (born March 30, 1967) is a Romanian-born American scientist, the Emil T. Hofmann professor at the University of Notre Dame. He is noted for research into scale-free networks and biological networks.
[edit] Biography
Born to a Szekler (Hungarian) family in Cârţa, Harghita County (Transylvania), he studied engineering in Romania, and took a master's degree in Hungary.
Barabási has been a major contributor to the development of real-world network theory, together with several other scientists from physics, mathematics, and computer science. His biggest role has been the introduction of the scale-free network concept, as well as a popularizer of network theory. Among the topics in network theory that Barabási has studied are growth and preferential attachment, the mechanisms responsible for the structure of the World Wide Web or the cell. According to the review of one of Barabási's books, preferential attachment can be described as follows:
"Barabási has found that the websites that form the network (of the WWW) have certain mathematical properties. The conditions for these properties to occur are threefold. The first is that the network has to be expanding, growing. This precondition of growth is very important as the idea of emergence comes with it. It is constantly evolving and adapting. That condition exists markedly with the world wide web. The second is the condition of preferential attachment, that is, nodes (websites) will wish to link themselves to hubs (websites) with the most connections. The third condition is what is termed competitive fitness which in network terms means its rate of attraction." www.sociopranos.com
[edit] Works
- Barabási, Albert-László Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else, 2004 ISBN 0-452-28439-2
- Barabási, Albert-László and Réka Albert. "Emergence of scaling in random networks", Science, 286:509-512, October 15, 1999.
- Barabási, Albert-László and Zoltán Oltvai, "Network Biology", Nature Reviews Genetics 5, 101-113 (2004).
