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martyb [soylentnews.org] writes:

Who is the main character in Game of Thrones? Mathematicians Have an Answer [qz.com]:

Fans of the Game of Thrones books and TV series have long quarreled [quora.com] over who the true hero [vice.com] of the story is. Daenerys? Tyrion? Jon Snow? Hodor [youtube.com]? Every time a character seems to be developing into a protagonist, he or she is brutally killed [youtube.com] (video). Such is the perilous existence of the major players in the world of the wildly popular HBO series—when you play the game of thrones, you win or you die [youtube.com].

But several main characters remain. And in order to determine the one true hero of them all—the one most vital to the story, with the most important connections to other characters—we must turn to math.

Andrew J. Beveridge, an associate professor of mathematics at Macalester College, and Jie Shan, an intrepid undergraduate, decided to turn the world of the Game of Thrones books into a social network using network science, a branch of applied graph theory that draws from several disciplines, including economics, sociology, and, computer science, to examine how information flows from one thing to another.

[...] the mathematicians ranked the characters by several different measures. One, called degree centrality, simply ranks the characters by how many others they’re connected with. Other measures, like PageRank (the same algorithm that Google uses for its search engine), actually puts the characters into a feedback loop, rewarding them based on how important the people that they’re associated with are in the network.

From TFS, here is the graph they constructed [wordpress.com]; the main character's name stands out among the others.

Their research, entitled “Network of Thrones,” is published in the Mathematical Association of America’s publication, Math Horizons [maa.org] (pdf).

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