[Milán Janosov's Nobel Network (Credit: Milán Janosov)]
Mumbai: An interesting study using Data Science Tools conducted to explore the power of Network Science revealed how Nobel laureates, past and present both, were socially connected to each other.
Milán Janosov, Network Science Researcher and Chief Data Scientist at Baoba, analysed the data of as many as 682 Nobel laureates for network mapping.
For the study Janosov besides other data sources relied on the data collected from the Wikipedia pages of the Nobel laureates.
The data analysis carried out by Janosov yielded interesting results, suggesting that many Nobel laureates were in fact in some way socially connected to each other.
Janosov's Nobel Network - details of which is published in Nightingale, Journal of the Data Visualization Society and is also available online on arXiv.org, further revealed a clear disparity between those who received prizes for scientific and humanistic work.
“Prize recipients for these different disciplines rarely appeared to be socially connected”, the study found.
In his research, Janosov's Nobel Network also highlighted that lesser number of women are the recipients of Nobel Prize in some categories including Physics.
Using the findings of his research, Janosov then created a visual network map representing the relationships between Nobel laureates, which consisted of 682 nodes (i.e., dots), and 588 connections between these nodes (representing connections between the laureates).
Einstein, Heisenberg, Marie Curie and other names figure on different nodes. About Marie Curie, Janosov wrote in the study:
“The Curie family dominated the Nobel. Marie Curie first shared a prize with her husband, Pierre, and later received a second award. Additionally, the mighty couple produced a Nobel-winning heir. Their daughter, Irène Curie, who shared the recognition with her husband, Frédéric Joliot, was awarded the prize in the field of Chemistry in 1935. “Marie Curie was a member of another fabulous example of the interlinked small world of laureates (sadly, Pierre passed away in 1906) - the Solvay Conference on Physics in 1911. It was probably the most impressive line-up in Science ever - 27 of the 29 participants had either already won, or later received, the Nobel Prize.”
“The Curie family dominated the Nobel. Marie Curie first shared a prize with her husband, Pierre, and later received a second award. Additionally, the mighty couple produced a Nobel-winning heir. Their daughter, Irène Curie, who shared the recognition with her husband, Frédéric Joliot, was awarded the prize in the field of Chemistry in 1935.
“Marie Curie was a member of another fabulous example of the interlinked small world of laureates (sadly, Pierre passed away in 1906) - the Solvay Conference on Physics in 1911. It was probably the most impressive line-up in Science ever - 27 of the 29 participants had either already won, or later received, the Nobel Prize.”
Janosov’s visual map of the Nobel laureate network also revealed some other discrepancies. For instance, while some Nobel Prize winners are closely connected to each other, others remain in the network's "outskirts," without being socially linked to most other Nobel laureates.
Janosov's recent work demonstrates the huge potential of network science for understanding various relationships, including the social connections between people who are part of a same group or category.
His work also shows how to spot exciting or unexpected patterns in the structure of a network and how to describe and interpret a network graph and can be used in a wide range of applications.
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