Human dynamics: Darwin and Einstein correspondence patterns

By J. G. Oliveira, Albert-László Barabási. Nature, 2005

311 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In an era when letters were the main means of exchanging scientific ideas and results, Charles Darwin (1809–82) and Albert Einstein (1879–1955) were notably prolific correspondents. But did their patterns of communication differ from those associated with the instant-access e-mail of modern times? Here we show that, although the means have changed, the communication dynamics have not: Darwin's and Einstein's patterns of correspondence and today's electronic exchanges follow the same scaling laws. However, the response times of their surface-mail communication is described by a different scaling exponent from e-mail communication, providing evidence for a new class of phenomena in human dynamics.

Subfields: Molecular Biology, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2b6bb1e375b036026dcc1dbd37b20ae82f80cec9

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In Molecular Biology

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Citations in the corpus

Robust dynamic classes revealed by measuring the response function of a social system (2008, background): “The first ingredient is a power law distribution of waiting times describing human activity (2, 3, 8) that expresses the latent impact of these various factors by using a response function, which, on the basis of previous work (9–11), we take to be a long-memory process of the form”
Universal features of correlated bursty behaviour (2011, methodology): “b we scaled them together using the scaling relation 〈tie〉P (tie) = P̃ (tie/〈tie〉) where 〈tie〉 denoted the average inter-event times, calculated separately for each groups as it was done in [5, 6].”