Most people think of the Vikings as bloodthirsty warriors who pillaged villages, but academics have used literature to challenge sterotypical views.
Mathematicians have uncovered complex social networks within age-old Icelandic sagas using a quantitative approach to find that there was more to Viking society than waging war.
They carried out a detailed analysis of the relationships described in ancient Icelandic manuscripts to shed new light on Viking society.
Pádraig Mac Carron and Ralph Kenna from Coventry University, set out on a quest to question whether remnants of reality could lurk within the pages of the documents in which Viking sagas were preserved.
They used complex mathematical methods including looking at the clustering of characters and their interactions to find that much like in our modern society, the 'six degrees of separation' applied across communities.
They applied methods from statistical physics to social networks, in which nodes (connection points) represent individuals and links represent interactions between them, to hone in on the relationships between the characters and societies depicted therein.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/a...putes.html
Didn't I say so just the other day?
Mathematicians have uncovered complex social networks within age-old Icelandic sagas using a quantitative approach to find that there was more to Viking society than waging war.
They carried out a detailed analysis of the relationships described in ancient Icelandic manuscripts to shed new light on Viking society.
Pádraig Mac Carron and Ralph Kenna from Coventry University, set out on a quest to question whether remnants of reality could lurk within the pages of the documents in which Viking sagas were preserved.
They used complex mathematical methods including looking at the clustering of characters and their interactions to find that much like in our modern society, the 'six degrees of separation' applied across communities.
They applied methods from statistical physics to social networks, in which nodes (connection points) represent individuals and links represent interactions between them, to hone in on the relationships between the characters and societies depicted therein.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/a...putes.html
Didn't I say so just the other day?
