Big talk on the pod today. My guest is Martin Rosvall. A network science legend. The creator of the InfoMap community detection algorithm (1).
Martin’s group (2) studies information flows through social and biological systems to understand their inner workings. By simplifying myriad network interactions into maps of significant information flows, they aim to address research questions about how diseases spread, plants respond to stress, and life distributes itself on Earth.
In today’s talk we talk about how a love for theory and not the subject matter of classical physics made Martin study information theory early on. We talk about serendipitously going to the Niels Bohr Institute and finding his postdoc advisor Carl Bergstrom on google. And in a big reveal - a LazyPod exclusive - we tell the story of how a grumpy reviewer and a TV star resulted in the name for the map equation. We wrap up talking about Martin’s yearly habit of taking young scientists into the Swedish wilderness.
# Timestamps
[0:00:00] Sune’s Intro
[0:01:44] Origin story and more
[0:38:12] The Saga of the Map Equation
# References
(1) https://www.mapequation.org
(2) https://www.martinrosvall.com and https://icelab.se
# Credits
The podcast has theme music by Waylon Thornton (and a little bit by me as well). WT's songs are "American Heart" and "Seven". Via freemusicarchive.org and licenced under CC BY-NC-SA. The podcast was funded in part by the Villum Foundation.