13 research outputs found
The classical origin of modern mathematics
The aim of this paper is to study the historical evolution of mathematical
thinking and its spatial spreading. To do so, we have collected and integrated
data from different online academic datasets. In its final stage, the database
includes a large number (N~200K) of advisor-student relationships, with
affiliations and keywords on their research topic, over several centuries, from
the 14th century until today. We focus on two different topics, the evolving
importance of countries and of the research disciplines over time. Moreover we
study the database at three levels, its global statistics, the mesoscale
networks connecting countries and disciplines, and the genealogical level
Pollen, women, war and other things : reflections on the history of palynology
I am grateful to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (Kungliga Vetenskapsakademien; KVA), Stockholm, for hosting the conference at which the themes in this paper were presented. For archival material, I appreciate access to (and the assistance of): Gunnar Erdtman papers, Center for History of Science, KVA (Maria Asp); Thomas Woodhead papers, Kirklees Museums and Galleries (Tolson Memorial Museum, Huddersfield; Chris Yates); Harold Hyde papers, Botany Section Correspondence, Amgueddfa Cymru National Museum Wales (Heather Pardoe); Kathleen Blackburn papers, Natural History Society of Northumbria Archive, Great North Museum (Hancock), Newcastle upon Tyne (Alan Hart); material concerning Florence Campbell James, Aberystwyth University (Julie Archer). Richard Bradshaw, Paul Buckland, Andrew Cameron, Peter Coxon, Egill Erlendsson, Michael Grant, Alan Hart, Angus Lunn, Limi Mao, Heather Pardoe, Ed Schofield and Richard West are thanked for advice and assistance. I appreciate the constructive comments on a draft of this paper by John Birks. Jenny Johnston assisted with artwork.Peer reviewedPublisher PD
Eigenvector-Based Centrality Measures for Temporal Networks
Numerous centrality measures have been developed to quantify the importances
of nodes in time-independent networks, and many of them can be expressed as the
leading eigenvector of some matrix. With the increasing availability of network
data that changes in time, it is important to extend such eigenvector-based
centrality measures to time-dependent networks. In this paper, we introduce a
principled generalization of network centrality measures that is valid for any
eigenvector-based centrality. We consider a temporal network with N nodes as a
sequence of T layers that describe the network during different time windows,
and we couple centrality matrices for the layers into a supra-centrality matrix
of size NTxNT whose dominant eigenvector gives the centrality of each node i at
each time t. We refer to this eigenvector and its components as a joint
centrality, as it reflects the importances of both the node i and the time
layer t. We also introduce the concepts of marginal and conditional
centralities, which facilitate the study of centrality trajectories over time.
We find that the strength of coupling between layers is important for
determining multiscale properties of centrality, such as localization phenomena
and the time scale of centrality changes. In the strong-coupling regime, we
derive expressions for time-averaged centralities, which are given by the
zeroth-order terms of a singular perturbation expansion. We also study
first-order terms to obtain first-order-mover scores, which concisely describe
the magnitude of nodes' centrality changes over time. As examples, we apply our
method to three empirical temporal networks: the United States Ph.D. exchange
in mathematics, costarring relationships among top-billed actors during the
Golden Age of Hollywood, and citations of decisions from the United States
Supreme Court.Comment: 38 pages, 7 figures, and 5 table
The global migration network of sex-workers
Differences in the social and economic environment across countries encourage
humans to migrate in search of better living conditions, including job
opportunities, higher salaries, security and welfare. Quantifying global
migration is, however, challenging because of poor recording, privacy issues
and residence status. This is particularly critical for some classes of
migrants involved in stigmatised, unregulated or illegal activities. Escorting
services or high-end prostitution are well-paid activities that attract workers
all around the world. In this paper, we study international migration patterns
of sex-workers by using network methods. Using an extensive international
online advertisement directory of escorting services and information about
individual escorts, we reconstruct a migrant flow network where nodes represent
either origin or destination countries. The links represent the direct routes
between two countries. The migration network of sex-workers shows different
structural patterns than the migration of the general population. The network
contains a strong core where mutual migration is often observed between a group
of high-income European countries, yet Europe is split into different network
communities with specific ties to non-European countries. We find
non-reciprocal relations between countries, with some of them mostly offering
while others attract workers. The GDP per capita is a good indicator of country
attractiveness for incoming workers and service rates but is unrelated to the
probability of emigration. The median financial gain of migrating, in
comparison to working at the home country, is 15.9%. Only sex-workers coming
from 77% of the countries have financial gains with migration and average gains
decrease with the GDPc of the country of origin. Our results shows that
high-end sex-worker migration is regulated by economic, geographic and cultural
aspects.Comment: Comments and feedback welcomed. Two tables and 6 figures including S
Random walks on hypergraphs
In the last twenty years network science has proven its strength in modelling
many real-world interacting systems as generic agents, the nodes, connected by
pairwise edges. Yet, in many relevant cases, interactions are not pairwise but
involve larger sets of nodes, at a time. These systems are thus better
described in the framework of hypergraphs, whose hyperedges effectively account
for multi-body interactions. We hereby propose a new class of random walks
defined on such higher-order structures, and grounded on a microscopic physical
model where multi-body proximity is associated to highly probable exchanges
among agents belonging to the same hyperedge. We provide an analytical
characterisation of the process, deriving a general solution for the stationary
distribution of the walkers. The dynamics is ultimately driven by a generalised
random walk Laplace operator that reduces to the standard random walk Laplacian
when all the hyperedges have size 2 and are thus meant to describe pairwise
couplings. We illustrate our results on synthetic models for which we have a
full control of the high-order structures, and real-world networks where
higher-order interactions are at play. As a first application of the method, we
compare the behaviour of random walkers on hypergraphs to that of traditional
random walkers on the corresponding projected networks, drawing interesting
conclusions on node rankings in collaboration networks. As a second
application, we show how information derived from the random walk on
hypergraphs can be successfully used for classification tasks involving objects
with several features, each one represented by a hyperedge. Taken together, our
work contributes to unveiling the effect of higher-order interactions on
diffusive processes in higher-order networks, shading light on mechanisms at
the hearth of biased information spreading in complex networked systems
Learning network embeddings using small graphlets
Techniques for learning vectorial representations of graphs (graph embeddings) have recently emerged as an effective approach to facilitate Machine Learning on graphs. Some of the most popular methods involve sophisticated features such as graph kernels or convolutional networks. In this work, we introduce two straightforward supervised learning algorithms based on small-size graphlet counts, combined with a dimension reduction step. The first relies on a classic feature extraction method powered by Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The second is a feature selection procedure also based on PCA. Despite their conceptual simplicity, these embeddings are arguably more meaningful than some popular alternatives and at the same time are competitive with state-of-the-art methods. We illustrate this second point on a downstream classification task. We then use our algorithms in a novel setting, namely to conduct an analysis of author relationships in Wikipedia articles, for which we present an original dataset. Finally, we provide empirical evidence suggesting that our methods could also be adapted to unsupervised learning algorithms
Local peer communities and future academic success of Ph.D. candidates
Compared to senior scientists, early-career scientists have largely been neglected in the literature on academic success. This study aims to identify the effects of local peer communities of Ph.D. candidates on their future careers. We argue that local communities of Ph.D. candidates may offer both supportive and competitive environments depending on the nature of the relationships between its members. While Ph.D. candidates generally learn from and support each other in their local peer communities, they may also compete for their mentor's attention and future academic positions. We analyse such complex peer effects for 90,264 Ph.D. candidates in the field of mathematics in a genealogical way, by measuring a candidate's academic career success by the number of next-generation Ph.D. candidates supervised later on. To capture both the supportive and competitive peer effects, we distinguish between local peers who share mentors (co-mentees) and other local peers. Our result suggests that competition exists primarily among peers who share mentors, and only at the start of one's career. We also find supportive effects among peers who do not share mentors, particularly those from the same cohort. Our results highlight the importance of universities supporting informal interactions among Ph.D. candidates