Albert-László Barabási is fascinated by a wide range of topics, from the structure of the brain and treating diseases with network medicine to the emergence of success in art and how science really works. His work uses the quantitative tools of network science, a research field that he pioneered, and led to the discovery of scale-free networks, helping explain the emergence of many natural, technological and social networks.
Barabási is the Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science at Northeastern University and holds an appointment in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He splits his time with Budapest, where he runs a European Research Council project at Central European University. A Hungarian born native of Transylvania, Romania, he received his masters in theoretical physics at the Eötvös University in Budapest, Hungary and his PhD three years later at Boston University.
Barabási’s latest book is The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success. He is also the author of Network Science, Linked and Bursts. He co-edited Network Medicine and The Structure and Dynamics of Networks. His books have been translated into over twenty languages.
As a society, we tend to focus on prodigies -- the young stars in their fields. But what if we looked at the people at the opposite end of the timeline instead? By studying them, network scientist Albert-László Barabási has come up with lessons that can benefit us all.
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