Samuel Arbesman is an applied mathematician and network scientist. He is a Senior Scholar at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and a fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. In addition, he writes for popular audiences as a contributor to Wired, and his essays about math and science have appeared in such places as the New York Times, The Atlantic, and the Ideas section of the Boston Globe. Arbesman’s first book about how knowledge changes over time entitled The Half-Life of Facts (Current/Penguin) will be published September 27, 2012.

Prior to joining the Kauffman Foundation, Arbesman was a research fellow in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School, where he used network science and applied mathematics to study innovation, scientific discovery, and prosocial behavior. He completed a PhD in computational biology at Cornell University in 2008, and earned a BA in computer science and biology at Brandeis University in 2004.

His CV can be found here.

Bonus information

My Erdos number is 4, due to my coauthorship with Jon Kleinberg, and my Bacon number is 1, due to my appearance as an extra in the documentary Connected: The Power of Six Degree, which features Kevin Bacon.

This means my Erdos-Bacon number is 5, one of the lower such numbers in the world of science.

On the side, I have coined a new word, named an asteroid, and created an eponymous constant. I am also responsible for the Milky Way Transit Authority subway map.