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Extraordinary materials shaped by the principles of complex networks
Marco Paggi is at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, 55100 Lucca, Italy.
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Scientists’ knowledge of the connectivity, robustness and functionality of complex networks — such as those that describe interactions in chemical and biological systems, social relationships and the Internet — has increased enormously over the past few decades1. The foundations of modern complex-network science were established by the pioneering contributions of Albert-László Barabási and Réka Albert2,3, who revealed universal mechanisms that explain the emergence of highly non-uniform network configurations. Writing in Nature, Both et al.4 report that ideas from network science can be used to design materials that have remarkable mechanical properties, incorporating connection diversity and variable component sizes found in complex systems into materials engineering.
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Barabási, A.-L. Network Science (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2016).
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