Dissertation RECOVERY PROCESSES AND DYNAMICS IN SINGLE AND INTERDEPENDENT NETWORKS by ANTONIO MAJDANDZIC

To my family and good friends, both scattered around the World. Acknowledgments I would like to thank my mentor and thesis advisor, H.E. Stanley. Gene is an institution himself. A great scientist, a perfect advisor and a great friend. In the final version of this draft I will write a luxurious paragraph on him and the five years I spent at BU. I enjoyed so much in his research group. Unfortunately, good things do not always last forever, but hopefully are replaced by other good things in life. I would like to thank my best friend Berislav, for being a person I could call at 3AM in the morning and talk about life, science, or any other topic. I thank him for reading all my papers and this thesis manuscript. He's also a physicist. I would like to thank my other best friend, Boris Podobnik, the funniest guy I know, for doing a great work with research. I miss our dinners at restaurants around Kenmore and BU campus. I thank Shlomo Havlin for being a huge motivator and inspiration, both as a scientist and as a wonderful person. Working with him, I was never afraid of my ideas. William Skocpol and Plamen Ivanov, for their advices and help with my thesis. I thank Tomislav Lipic for discussing my research with me, and teaching me how to code. iv I thank Mirtha Cabello for helping me so many times at BU. When I remember Boston University, a few things come to my mind first, and Mirtha is one of them. Room 101 will long stay in my memory as " home " .