[FRIAM] looking for a word

Marcus Daniels marcus at snoutfarm.com
Fri Aug 17 14:28:51 EDT 2018


Persistent homology?

On 8/17/18, 12:09 PM, "Friam on behalf of uǝlƃ ☣" <friam-bounces at redfish.com on behalf of gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

    Maybe.  But I tend to think of a hub as a kind of homogenous mixing point.  E.g. a bicycle hub has all the spokes connnecting to the hub at equal distances.  For water flow, something like a sewage treatment plant might have a reservoir into which pipes or canals feed, where the pipes/canals are all roughly the same length and enter the reservoir at similar distances and (possible) flow rates (pipe sizes, etc.).
    
    A river confluence, for example, might have 2 streams merge at one point, then a 3rd stream merge in later,  a stream merging with a big stream, etc.  So, there's some implication that the merging/branching is heterogeneous.
    
    Abstracting the detail of such a thing would definitely make it some sort of "mixing hub".  But it wouldn't be "well-mixed" if you zoomed in.  All concrete hubs (e.g. Unilever in a supply chain model or whatnot) *do* have some sort of internal structure you can see when you zoom in, though.  So, maybe a qualified phrase like "fractal hub" would work?
    
    
    On 08/17/2018 10:53 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
    > A hub?
    > 
    > On 8/17/18, 11:47 AM, "Friam on behalf of uǝlƃ ☣" <friam-bounces at redfish.com on behalf of gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
    > 
    >     
    >     I need a word (or short phrase) to refer to the portion of a network where the edges converge or diverge (more than other parts of the network.  Examples might be a river delta or the branching (debranching?) of blood vessels or lungs.  "Plexus" or "knot" don't work because they could ambiguously refer to something like a tapestry or ... well, a knot, where each thread remains separate, but winds around other threads.  Something close to "canalization" seems appropriate. But I don't want to imply the generation (or dissolution) of the thing.  E.g. [arter|ang]iogenesis are not the type of words I'm looking for.
    >     
    >     There's got to be a good word for such, perhaps from graph theory or "network theory".  Any help will be rewarded by an IOU for a pint of beer. 8^)
    
    
    -- 
    ☣ uǝlƃ
    
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