Discrete Mathematics in the

Modern World

1
 Mathematics - Driven by Needs

BC: calendar - astronomy

architecture - geometry
navigation - trigonometry
Middle Ages: currency conversion - algebra
introduction of arabic numberals
Rennaissance: first printed maths book:
Peurbach’s Theoricae nova planetarum (1472)
16th -19th century: science - calculus
gambling - probability, combinatorics
20th century: economics - game theory
efficiency - linear programming
Computer age: algorithmic theory, numerical
maths, cryptography, finite mathematics,
graph theory

2
 Graphs

Def: A graph is an object consisting of

(i) points in the plane (the vertices)
(ii) lines joining the points (the edges)

Rem: Often used synonymously: network

Clarification: A graph is not

3
Ex: A map with cities and freeways is a graph

4
Ex: Consider only cities and freeways

5
Ex: London Underground is a graph

6
Ex: The structural formula of Butane is a
graph

7
Ex: (i) network of metabolic pathways
(ii) study of genes
(iii) computer networks
(iv) telephone networks
(v) social networks (friendship graph)
Ex: Characterisation of interval graphs led to
Nobel Prize for Microbiology for Benzer’s work
on the fine structure of genes.

8
Def: Distance between vertices a and b:

dist(a, b) = #steps needed to get from a to b.

Ex: Graph below: d(a, b) = 1 and d(a, c) = 2.

Rem: If a graph models a transportation net-

work, then

dist(a, b) ∼ travel time from a to b

Def: diameter = largest of all distances.
Ex: Above: diam(G) = 2.

9
Rem: In a transportation network:

Diameter ∼ maximum travel time.

Rem: In a sociological network:

Diameter ∼ measure of cohesion.

10
Rem: The friendship graph F :
Vertices = people, edges = friendships.
Rem: Very big, hard to study F .
Q: Diameter of F ?
Experiment: (S. Milgram, 1967)
(i) starter receives folder with name + address
of target,
(ii) hands folder to someone closer to target,
(iii) many folders reached targets in ≤ 6 steps.
Conclusion: diam(G) is about 6,
the SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION.
Rem: Some objections, but more or less ac-
cepted.

Mathematics says...

11
Def: The degree of a vertex is the number of
vertices it is joined to.
Ex: Graph below: deg(a) = 3 and deg(c) = 2.
The overall average degree is 3.2.

Rem: Friendship graph: degree = # friends.

Reasoning: We know:
(i) F has, say, 5.000.000.000 vertices,
(ii) F has average degree about, say, 42,
(iii) 99% of all graphs satisfying (i) and (ii)
have diameter about 6.
so we conclude
probably diam(F ) ≈ 6.

12
Erdös, Renyi: Theory of Random Graphs:
Many properties hold for either close to 100%
of all graphs, or for close to 0%, depending on
the average degree.
Theo: Of all graphs with n vertices and av-
erage degree d, where d ≥ log n, almost 100%
have
log n
diam(G) ≈ constant × .
log d¯
Rem: log n is much smaller than n,

log n ≈ # digits of n
Cor: Most likely diam(F ) is very small.

13
 Power Law Distributions

Lotka’s Law (1926): Let A(k) = # authors

who published k scientific articles. Then
1
A(k) ≈ constant × 2 .
k
Let A(k) be the number of authors who pub-
lished exactly k articles. If, say, 1000 authors
wrote one paper, then approximately
A(1) A(2) A(3) A(4) A(5) . . .

1000 1000
4
1000
9
1000 1000 . . .
16 25
1000 = 250 = 111 = 64 = 40 . . .
A(k) follows a power law with exponent 2.

14
Rem: Typical for power law: many authors
published 1 paper, fewer published 2, even fewer
published 3,...
Rem: Power law =“heavy tail distribution”
(polynomial, not exponential)

15
Zipf’s Law (1952): Suppose all English words
are listed in order of frequency: w1 being the
most common word, w2 the second most com-
mon word, etc. If
W (k) = # occurrences of wk per 100 words
of standard text,
then
W (k) follows a power law with exponent 1:
1
W (k) ≈ const × .
k
Rem: Similar for all human languages and
some programming languages.
Awerbach (1913) City sizes follow a power
law.

16
Def: Let G be a large graph. Let

Deg(k) = #vertices of degree k.

If Deg(k) follows a power law, then we say that
G is a power law graph.
Observation Many graphs are power law.
Year Network # vert. d exp.
Social:
1999 phone calls 47 million 3.16 2.1
2002 emails 59912 1.44 1.5
1998 film actors 449.913 3.48 2.3
Information:
1999 www.nd.edu 269.504 5.55 2.1
2005 the web 53 billion 2.1
2002 word co-occurr. 460902 70.1 2.7
1998 citation netw. 783.339 8.57 3.0
Biological:
2000 metabolic netw. 765 9.64 2.2
2001 protein interact. 2115 2.12 2.4

17
 The Web

Rem: Prime example of a PLG: WWW

Rem: Important pages have large in-degree.

indeg(google) = 4, indeg(P D home) = 1.
Rem: WWW grows by preferential attach-
ment:
A new page is more likely to be linked to pages
that already have many links.
Rem: Graphs that grow by preferential attach-
ment are usually PLG.

18
Theo: Of all PLG with n vertices and given
average degree d, almost 100% have

diam(G) ≈ constantd × log log n.

Meaning: PLG have extremely small diame-
ter.
Study: The web has diameter about 19.
Rem: F also grows by preferential attach-
ment. So F is also a power law graph.
Corollary: If F is a PLG, then probably diam(F )
is extremely small.

19
 Searching the Web

Rem: search engines consist of 3 parts:

crawler: surfs the web and sends data on the
content of web pages to the search engine
indexer: builds an index (list of key words of
each page)
query engine: checks which pages have rele-
vant content, then ranks the pages found.

Difficult part: Ranking

Rem: Old search engines (AltaVista, Lycos)
were text based.
Google uses the structure of the web graph.
Vast improvement!

20
Bad idea: Use in-degree for ranking.

Solution: PageRank algorithm

(L. Page, S. Brin, 1998)
Tool: Use random walks along edges:
If we are at the School of Maths page then
1 1
Prob(SoM −→ SAMS) = = .
outdeg(SoM) 4
Idea: Rank according to # visits.

21
Def: For a web page A define visits(A) as
# times A is visited
visits(A) =
total number of steps
of a long random walk.
Idea: Rank pages according to visits.
Determine visits: Discrete Markov chains with
transition matrix P where
1
(
outdeg(i)
if i links to j,
Pi,j =
0 otherwise,
but if vertex i has outdeg(i) = 0, then let
1 1 1 1
ith row = ( , , , . . . , )
n n n n
to avoid getting stuck.
Add, with 15% probability, a random jump
from vertex i to any vertex. New transition
matrix
Q = 0.85P + 0.15J,
where J is the ‘all 1’ n × n matrix.
Qt is ≥ 0 and primitive. By Perron-Frobenius
it has a unique eigenvector E > 0. If |E| = 1
then E corresponds to a stationary state:

visit(i) = Ei.

22
Ex: A typical random graph with most vertices
having the same degree:

23
Ex: A typical power law graph with many ver-
tices of small degree and few vertices of large
degree :

24