From spherical chicken to the tipping points of a complex network

The outbreak of epidemics, the emergence of the financial crisis, the collapse of ecosystem, and the explosive spreading of rumors, we face many challenges in today’s world. These real-world problems can be abstracted into a sequential break down of a complex system in an increasingly stressful environment. Because both the system and the environment require a large number of parameters to describe, the break down conditions has been difficult to estimate. We use a highly symmetric system to gauge a complex environment, which enables us to propose a scalar benchmark to describe the environment. This allows us to prove that all the tipping points of a complex network fall between the maximum k-core and maximum eigenvalue of the network.