Joined 16 years ago
Much of the article is consumed with invidious comparisons of scale-free, preferential attachment network models of the internet with the authors’ own HOT (”highly organized/optimized tolerances/tradeoffs”) models: “In view of such a simple physical explanation of the origins of node degree variability in the Internet’s router-level topology, Stogartz’ question, paraphrasing Shakespeare’s Macbeth, ‘…power law scaling, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?’ has a resounding affirmative answer.” The authors seem to suggest by this literary reference that a scale-invariant model of the Internet is a “tale told by an idiot.” This would not be lost on the readership of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society.
Its authors spare no opportunity to criticize their competition, as well as mathematicians and physicists generally, whom they regard as foppish, insular ivory tower aesthetes, whose nostrils are unacquainted with the bracing scent of an expertly soldered electrical connection.
Despite all of that, the authors are correct. I mention Doyle et al. because other authors have been critical of work on scale-free networks--this is not new. Doyle et al. warned about the misapplication of such networks to biology, though they mysteriously claimed that such failures of the scientific method "would reflect poorly on mathematics," as if mathematicians ought to be held responsible.
