Effort to Model Facebook Yields Key to Famous Math Problem (and a Prize)

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Effort to Model Facebook Yields Key to Famous Math Problem (and a Prize)

Monday, July 7, 2014
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Dan Spielman, a Yale computer scientist, wasn’t looking for a new problem. He was already deeply immersed in a tricky effort to model complex online communities like Facebook, hoping to gain insight into how they form and interact.

But when a colleague in Jerusalem observed that aspects of Spielman’s research brought to mind the famous — and unsolved — Kadison-Singer math problem, Spielman saw irresistibly low-hanging fruit — or so it seemed.

YINS