Albert-László Barabási wins award from Network Science Society
The Robert Gray Dodge professor of network science and university distinguished professor was recently honored by the Network Science Society for his foundational work in the field.
It was a recognition 27 years in the making, but by design.
Albert-László Barabási, Northeastern University distinguished professor of physics and co-founder of the relatively new field of network science, was honored for his contributions to the discipline and presented with the Euler Award by the Network Science Society. The award, the highest research honor given by the society, recognizes specific discoveries “that fundamentally change our understanding of network science,” said Michelle Girvan, president of the society.
Barabási, who is also the Robert Gray Dodge professor of network science at Northeastern, called the award “the greatest honor I could have dreamed of receiving.”
Network science studies the connections within parts of a system, made up of nodes, or the points of connection, and edges, which refer to the connections or relationships between the nodes. This field of study can be applied to the smallest of cellular links, up to large and abstract concepts like the internet.
Barabási was celebrated for his 1999 groundwork-laying discovery with Réka Albert of scale-free networks and the preferential attachment mechanism. Their findings showed that most nodes have few connections, and few nodes have many connections. Nodes with higher connections, or a hub, have a better likelihood of receiving new links.
“Before this work, networks were largely modeled as random structures,” Girvan said. “Barabási showed that many real-world networks – from the World Wide Web and social networks to biological and technological systems – share common organizing principles that give rise to highly heterogeneous connectivity patterns.”
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Through his work mapping the World Wide Web, Barabási also found that networks aren’t random and can be predicted, finding that any two websites are no more than 19 clicks apart.
This framework has implications in a number of fields, from biology to engineering to social sciences.
As a co-founder of the discipline and founding president of the Network Science Society, Barabási said he feels network science has “successfully left its parental home.”
“It has now moved beyond its teenage years and established itself as a distinct discipline, with its own intellectual core, challenges, methods, and goals,” he told Northeastern Global News.
The future of network science may experience new challenges as the field becomes more “intelligent,” particularly with the proliferation of artificial intelligence and large language models, Barabási said.
“We now face major scientific questions about the role of networks in this new landscape – not only in science, but in life more broadly,” he said. “Understanding how network structure and intelligence interact will, I believe, be one of the field’s central challenges in the years ahead.”
Several members have wanted to nominate Barabási for the Euler Award since its inception in 2019, Girvan said.
“He consistently declined consideration because he believed the award should first become firmly established on its own. We are especially pleased that we can now honor the scientific discovery that helped launch the field itself,” she said.
The award is named after 18th-century Swiss mathematician and physicist Leonhard Euler, who is known for his historical work in network analysis, specifically the “Seven Bridges of Königsberg” logistics puzzle that asks whether it’s possible to cross seven bridges into the Russian city just once. Past recipients of the Euler Award include Northeastern’s Alessandro Vespignani.
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