Prize Recipient


Recipient Picture

Marc Mezard
Ecole Normale Superieure

Citation:

"For groundbreaking work applying spin glass ideas to ensembles of computational problems, yielding both new classes of efficient algorithms and new perspectives on phase transitions in their structure and complexity."

Background:

Marc Mezard graduated in 1980 from Ecole normale superieure (ENS) in Paris, France. He then earned his Ph.D. in physics from ENS in 1984. He has been a researcher at CNRS since 1981 and is presently the director of Ecole Normale Superieure where the stem of his research is the statistical physics of disordered systems. Together with his collaborators, he has made contributions to the theory of spin glasses, the hierarchical structure of metastable states (ultrametricity), and the non-self averageness of some physical properties. This has led to the construction of the cavity method. His work includes; disordered systems in physics, (spin glasses, pinning of random interfaces - manifolds, aging dynamics, fluctuation dissipation theorem in glasses, level correlations in disordered electronic systems, structural glasses, disordered superconductors) - Interface of physics and biology (theory of heteropolymers and their elongation properties, learning and memory in neural networks) - Information theory and computer science (error correcting codes, satisfiability of random Boolean formulae, group testing, broadcast and reconstruction, compressed sensing)- Econophysics (wealth condensation, order books dynamics).



Selection Committee:

Roderick Moessner, Chair; Karin Damen; Franz Wegner; Cris Moore; James Sauls