Published: Oct. 29, 2019
Clauset receives his award from CU Boulder Chancellor Phil DiStefano

Associate Professor Aaron Clauset was honored with the University of Colorado Boulder Provost’s Faculty Achievement Award earlier this month for his co-authored paper “Scale-free networks are rare” in Nature Communications.  

The paper challenged the network science “scale free” paradigm, which asserts that all networks, regardless of origin, exhibit a universal "power law" pattern in the way they are connected. The paper analyzed more than 1,000 real-world networks and found that only about 4 percent of them met this scale-free test.

The paper was co-authored by Anna Broido (PhDApMath’19), whose PhD work was advised by Clauset. Broido is currently a fellow at Insight Data Science in San Francisco.

Clauset is an internationally recognized expert on network science, data science and complex systems. He received the 2016 Erdos-Renyi Prize in Network Science, and his research has appeared in prestigious scientific venues like Nature, Science, PNAS and SIAM Review. 

For a closer look at the research, check out an article in Quanta Magazine.