Lee Historical Lectures in Physics: Giorgio Parisi, Apr 21, 2026

Giorgio Parisi 

Emeritus Professor, La Sapienza University of Roma
2021 Nobel Prize in Physics

"Spin Glasses, Complexity and All That"

Tuesday, April 21, 2026 @4:30PM

Jefferson Lab, Room 250
17 Oxford Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
 

Abstract:
I will recall the origins of the concept of multiple equilibria in the natural sciences and argue that the existence of multiple equilibria underlies complexity. I will then describe how this concept has been developed in the framework of statistical mechanics, starting from the study of spin glasses. Finally, I will briefly discuss the cornucopia of applications of these ideas across physics and other disciplines, with particular attention to artificial intelligence.

Giorgio Parisi is an Italian physicist, activist, popularizer of science, and author. 

After graduating in 1970 from the University of Rome, he joined the Frascati National Laboratories, then in 1981, at the age of 33, he became Professor of Theoretical Physics in Rome, first at the University of Tor Vergata, then from 1992 at Sapienza University of Rome as a lecturer in Quantum Theories.

Since 1988, he has been a member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (of which he was president and is now vice-president and president of the Class of Physical, Mathematical and Natural Sciences), the Accademia dei Quaranta and the European Academy. Since 1992 he has been a member of the American National Academy of Sciences, since 1993 of the French Académie des Sciences, and since 2013 of the American Philosophical Society.

In 1992 he was awarded the Boltzmann Medal (awarded every three years by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics) for his contributions to the theory of disordered systems, the Dirac Medal for Theoretical Physics in 1999, and the Max Planck Medal in 2011, by the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. He received, among numerous other awards, the Feltrinelli Prize for Physics in 1987, the Enrico Fermi Prize in 2003, the Dannie Heineman Prize in 2005, the Nonino Prize ‘to a Master of our time’ in 2005, the Nature Award Mentoring in Science in 2013, the European Physical Society’s Prize for High Energy and Particle Physics in 2015, the Lars Onsager Prize from the American Physical Society in 2016, and in 2021 he received the prestigious Wolf Prize for Physics. In October 2021, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his discovery of the interaction between disorder and fluctuations in physical systems, from the atomic to planetary scale,"