Knowing a little about the local connections on flight maps and other networks can reveal a lot about a system’s global structure. The post Math That Lets You Think Locally but Act Globally first appeared on Quanta Magazine
In math, as in life, small choices can have big consequences. This is especially true in graph theory, a field that studies networks of objects and the connections between them. Here’s a little puzzle to help you see why. Given six dots, your goal is to connect them to each other with line segments so that there’s always a path between any pair of dots, with no path exceeding two line segments in…