Marc Mézard
Biography: My general interest is the statistical physics of disordered systems. A system can be disordered either because each particle (or spin, or neuron, or economic agent...) is different from all other ones, or because it sees a different environment: generally this happens in a glassy phase, in which the various particles freeze in some positions which look random, and don't have the periodicity of a crystal. In these cases it turns out to be very difficult to even understand the basics of the collective behaviour, such as the phase diagram. This field has been one of the main developments of statistical physics in the last two or three decades. In classical physics, it basically started with spin glasses, and some offsprings developed gradually towards such diverse systems as combinatorial optimization problems, error correcting codes, neural networks, structural glasses, or systems of interacting economic agents with heteronegeous strategies.
Field(s) of Research: Computer Science Theory, General Non-equilibrium Statistical Physics
