Michael Aizenman, Princeton University

A mathematical physicist's perspective on Statistical Mechanics

Statistical mechanics explains and quantifies the process by which structure emerges from chaos. Its genesis is in Boltzmann's explanation of thermodynamical behavior and in particular of the concept of entropy. The statistic mechanical perspective was instrumental for Planck's theory of the light quantization and Einstein's calculation of the Avogadro number. More recent developments include links between the physics of critical phenomena and the mathematics of conformally invariant random structures, stochastic integrability, and representation theory. The talk will focus on examples of observations and conjectures which turned out to point in fruitful directions.