​Join us for a Science Café Stellenbosch talk by Prof Hugo Touchette for an introduction to graph theory and network science – from your Facebook friend's to Eskom's electricity grid.

More about the talk
Networks and graphs are all around us, even if we don't notice much: roads, Eskom's electricity grid, airline routes, mini taxis in Cape Town, even your group of real and Facebook friends - they're all networks involving 'nodes' and 'links' between these nodes. Scientists have been getting more and more interested in these networks and especially in classifying their 'shape'. Are all networks the same? Are there 'universal' types of networks? Is a Facebook-friend network the same shape as an electricity grid network? How do networks evolve? Can we control networks? These are some of the questions I'll be discussing in this presentation.
More about the speaker
Hugo Touchette is Professor of Applied Mathematics in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Stellenbosch University, where he teaches probability and statistics, random processes, and soon machine learning. He moved to South Africa in 2013 after spending nine years at Queen Mary University of London. He holds a PhD from McGill University in Canada, where he is from.

 Science Café Stellenbosch is an initiative from the Faculty of Science at Stellenbosch University to encourage conversations about science in the public sphere.

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