From food webs to friendships to flight maps — a short love letter to the science of how things are connected, and why the links matter more than the nodes.
My research interest, if I'm allowed to be earnest for a paragraph, is how ecological networks reorganise themselves when the world changes around them. Lose a species, add a road, warm the water by a degree — what holds, what reroutes, what quietly collapses?
The thing about networks is that they're never really about the nodes. A food web isn't a list of animals; it's a map of who depends on whom. Resilience lives in the redundancy of the links.
Once you start seeing it, you can't stop. Airports, gut microbiomes, gossip, power grids, the way ideas spread through a lab group — all the same maths wearing different coats.
This blog is partly an excuse to follow that thread wherever it goes, complex or simple or downright wacky. Mostly wacky, if I'm honest.
Thanks for wandering this far. There's always another curiosity around the corner.
More from the journal