This Man Could Rule the World
How Albert-László Barabási went from mapping systems to controlling them In 1736 the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler ended a debate among the citizens of Königsberg, Prussia, by drawing a graph. The Pregel River divided the city, now Kaliningrad, Russia, into four sections. Seven bridges connected them. Could a person cross all seven without walking over the same one twice? Euler began with a map that cleared away everything-the homes and streets and coffeehouses-irrelevant to the question at hand. Then he translated that map into something even more abstract, a depiction not of a physical place but of an interconnected system. The four sections became dots, and the seven bridges became lines. By transforming Königsberg into simple nodes and edges (as mathematicians have come to call such abstractions), Euler could subject the system to mathematical analysis. In doing so, he proved that a person could not cross all seven bridges without walking over...