Facebook has made me go back to the late 70's when they got the math modern and disturbing companion, set theory, to my school in Caracas.
The term "network" must have at this time technical definitions, sociological, and in some sectors such as advertising, optimistic. Anyway, I will focus only on my experience in linking a network, such as FB, with basic notions of modern mathematics that I tried to learn in school and hung in a crack in my memory.
FB is an integrated set of elements that we call friends and have friends in this context is not very difficult to say. It is only necessary that a condition is met: there is initial interest from two people recognized as friends. From that moment everything can work out of inertia or interest. From the lowest interest, as the curiosity, even higher, as the exchange of ideas. And all at once.
The nature of the elements that may form part of a group of friends on FB is complex and in some cases, not responding to a logic beyond 0 or 1. "A body is a sack full of items. Within the sac may be numbers, letters, plants, people, mastodons, ..., almost anything" in the words of the German mathematician Dedekind (1831-1916). FB
makes it possible, through a process of selection, can muster in a list to our friends active and inactive. To friends of the present and the past. A sporadic and missing those friends. A potential friends. A known and almost completely unknown. To those who knew but have forgotten. To our dear colleagues and former teammate of a night life, battles, work, study, party. In the not so beloved. Our relatives and the relatives of our friends. For bosses, customers, partners and / or subordinates. Teachers and students. Idols and fans. And for others in general.
Each member represents a subset of FB in the superset, where operations:
Intersection - The common friends between A and B
Difference - Friends of A are not B
Add Friends - Friends of B who are not friends of A Symmetric Difference
- Friends A and B have no common
Partitions - Internal divisions into subsets, the total of the friends of A or B
These operations would also add an experiment that has been around for our lives in the network, called "6 Degrees of Separation", which tries to prove, through FB that all people are separated by 6 others, on average.
Now remember that at school without explanation, from one day to another, let the sets back. The bet was Back-to-Basics, so that we could learn what the teachers were not getting to teach modern mathematics.
Fortunately or not FB is a universe but not the universe and a detailed analysis of exceptions and contradictions in our group, they can check.
"Neither are all that are, or are all those"
are not on FB all my friends who are , nor are my friends everyone FB.
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