Applied Mathematics Commons^™

Random Graphs: From Paul Erdős To The Internet, Michał Karoński

Dalrymple Lecture Series

Paul Erdős, one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century, was a champion of applications of probabilistic methods in many areas of mathematics, such as a graph theory, combinatorics and number theory. He also, almost fifty years ago, jointly with another great Hungarian mathematician Alfred Rényi, laid out foundation of the theory of random graphs: the theory which studies how large and complex systems evolve when randomness of the relations between their elements is incurred. In my talk I will sketch the long journey of this theory from the pioneering Erdős era to modern attempts to model properties of …