Prize Talk: Leo P. Kadanoff PrizeThe Statistical Physics of Networks

Many systems of scientific interest can be usefully represented as networks, including the Internet, the power grid, the road network, networks of friendship or acquaintance, ecological networks, biochemical networks, and many others.  As large-scale data on these networks has become available in recent decades, a new science of networks has grown up combining observations and theory and drawing heavily on ideas from physics -- and particularly statistical physics -- to shed light on systems ranging from bacteria to the whole of human society.  This talk will give an introduction to this rapidly-growing interdisciplinary field and explain some its best known results and recent discoveries, and what they can tell us about the way the world works.