shmuel is good at saying things that sound false/meaningless but actually make sense

[skolem_hull]

"You could figure out the first eigenvalue of the internet, and might be troubled by it."
Last thing he said in class: "Now I've said too much. Or too little. Or really both."

Comments

[rose_garden]

"You could figure out the first eigenvalue of the internet, and might be troubled by it."

Depends on the basis.

[skolem_hull]

It's (kind of) an abuse of language. The 'eigenvalues of a graph' (such as the internet, I guess) are meant to be the eigenvalues of the graph Laplacian (a matrix, or linear operator, that depends on the graph).

...and whether you're troubled by it depends on how paranoid you are about terrorists (or whatever). The first non-zero eigenvalue of that matrix says how hard it is to disconnect the graph by cutting some edges.

[skolem_hull]

... I should add that this matrix I'm calling the 'Laplacian' is related to the Laplacian you might know from physics.

[skolem_hull]

hmm, interesting. I ought to know more than I do about pagerank.