WANT to learn how to influence people? Rather than take dubious advice from a self-help guru, you could try listening to the mathematicians who have cracked the problem.
David Kempe and his colleagues at Cornell University in New York have found a way to identify who you should talk to if you want your ideas spread to as many people as possible. And contrary to what common sense might predict, it is not necessarily the person with the most contacts.
Kemp’s team studied a community of 10,750 particle physicists. The researchers envisaged this community as a network, in which each person is represented as a node…
