Workshop on Topology: Identifying Order in Complex Systems

We are surrounded by functional networks, from fluid transport in plants and animals to macroscopic elastic scaffoldings and microscopic crystals and materials, and engineered power grids. Often, such networks can be seen as optimized for their function, either through evolution and natural selection or by human design. In this presentation, we investigate a number of functional networks from biology and engineering and show how optimization shapes their weighted topology in similar ways despite their different functional goals.