Physics (Internal)

Emergence of Heterogeneity in Friendship Networks

This event is part of the Preliminary Oral Exam.

Examining Committee:Sid Redner, William Klein, Martin Schmaltz, Shyam Erramilli

Abstract In spite of the complicated psychology and behavior dynamics that go into making friends, on an average the act of adding links to the friendship network can be reduced to few basic rules. We identify these rules and make a toy model which has a growing network that exhibits many features that are seen in worldly networks (e.g. Facebook). In particular this model shows a transition where the network changes from a dense network to a sparse network. Around this transition we see highly clustered networks with a lot of community structure showing that it is possible to get a high amount of heterogeneity from simple homogeneous rules.