Renaud Lambiotte - Quadrilaterals with a 7-year-old

With school closure, Charlie and I have been doing some geometry for the last two months. After playing with straight lines and triangles, and as we did not have a proper compass to draw circles, we looked at the different types of quadrilaterals, and we explored random quadrilaterals and how they would intersect with each others. This work is clearly inspired by random geometric graphs, where circles are randomly drawn in the plane, and where their overlap induces a notion of connectivity between them. In the current COVID situation, this was some sort of a metaphor for how people may be interacting due to physical proximity, and the power of randomness to shape the dynamics of a disease.

Renaud is Associate Professor of Networks and Nonlinear Systems in the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford.