Analysis of the Wikipedia network of mathematicians

Abstract

We look at the network of mathematicians defined by the hyperlinks between their biographies on Wikipedia. We show how to extract this information using three snapshots of the Wikipedia data, taken in 2013, 2017 and 2018. We illustrate how such Wikipedia data can be used by performing a centrality analysis. These measures show that Hilbert and Newton are the most important mathematicians. We use our example to illustrate the strengths and weakness of centrality measures and to show how to provide estimates of the robustness of centrality measurements. In part, we do this by comparison to results from two other sources: an earlier study of biographies on the MacTutor website and a small informal survey of the opinion of mathematics and physics students at Imperial College London.