Milán Janosov, Founder of Geospatial Data Consulting and Chief Data Scientist at Baoba, recently set out to map the relationships between scientists who took part in the Manhattan Project using methods rooted in network science. Network or data science is a field of research that explores the intricate connections between people in a group or between individual parts of networked systems. The work is published on the arXiv preprint server.

"I have been working with social networks and mapping unusual datasets to uncover hidden connections for a while," Janosov said. "During this journey, I also mapped hidden networks of scientists, including for instance, the network of Nobel laureates in another project released earlier this year. So, I already had a history of mapping scientists' networks. After watching the long-awaited Oppenheimer movie, I decided to also untangle the collaboration and social connections behind the Manhattan project, which if one of the largest, most impactful scientific collaborations of human history."

The release of the popular movie Oppenheimer in July this year re-awoke significant public interest in the Manhattan Project and the substantial research efforts that led to the development of the atomic bomb. This inspired Janosov, a trained network scientist with a background in physics, to explore this topic in his research.

"A practical and traditionally accepted way of building networks of scientists relies on shared publications," Janosov explained. "However, even today, some of the Manhattan Project's science is classified, so that direction would have distorted the picture. So, I decided to drop this steer away from classified and private data to the most public information platform available—Wikipedia."