Random networking : between order and chaos

With the arrival of the Internet, a good understanding of networks has become important for everyone. Network theory, which originated in the eighteenth century with Euler, and in the nineteenth century withMarkov, has until recently concentrated its attentionmainly on regular types of graphs. In his inaugural lecture, Remco van der Hofstad shows us a shift towards highly irregular graphs having vertices with extremely high degrees. He argues that this irregularity is a main characteristic of real life networks such as the Internet, social networks and networks describing biophysical phenomena. On January 1, 2005, Remco van der Hofstad was appointed full professor in Probability at the University of Eindhoven.