»Lime in the cocoa-nut?

I am re-reading Robert Kanigel's evocative biography of Srinivas Ramanujan The Man Who Knew Infinity.

Amongst the thrilling problems presented in the text is the case of the guavas and the monkey:

"Two monkeys having robbed an orchard of 3 times as many plantains as guavas, are about to begin their feast when they espy the injured owner of the fruits stealthily approaching with a stick. They calculate that it will take him 2 ¹/₄ minutes to reach them. One monkey who can eat 10 guavas per minute finishes them in ²/₃ of the time, and then helps the other to eat the plantains. They finish just in time. If the first monkey eats plantains twice as fast as guavas, how fast can the second monkey eat plantains?"

Meanwhile, in the practical aspects of mathematics: I attended a talk by Raissa D'Souza, a statistical physicist who studies organic networks:

locality = decentralized control self-organization: scalable growth, grow indefinitely without need for additional controls

fluctuation: distribution of tasks and load; of data and processing;

Preferential attachment:
Zipf's law, power -law distribution
Zipf 1949

Polya 1923 "Attractiveness is proportional to size"
dP(s)/dt [alpha] s

One of the slides she presented was based on statistical collection of sexual contact in Co Springs!

fertile vertices
Nash eqm (network game theory)
sortative vs assortative mixing (M E J Newman Phys. Rev. Lett, 2002 UMich)

immunization models vs network topology

Small World Networks:

model power graphs on a taurus / tauroid, not a square / cube