Maths predicts if friendships will last Want to know whether
your network of friends will survive or break up? Try
mathematics, researchers say. They've been looking at social
interaction in the complex, fast-moving world of online social
networks and people's mobile phone contacts. They've come up
with an alogorithm to explain it all, which they publish today
in the journal Nature. Professor Tamas Vicsek of Budapest's
Eotvos Lorand University and colleagues trawled through two sets
of data to explore how people link up. One was a collaborative
network of more than 30,000 researchers connected to an archive
at New York's Cornell University; the other was the year-long
record of communications patterns of 4 million mobile phone
users. Put together, these figures provided an intriguing
picture of relationship dynamics. The Hungarian and US team
found that small groups only last if they have an unchanged core
of members, in other words, a clique. "A typically small and
stationary community undergoes minor change