Author: Christian Beck
This year’s prize of the EPS Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
Division honours two outstanding scientists, who are pioneers in their
respective fields. The 2021 EPS Statistical and Nonlinear Physics Prize
was awarded during the 3rd EPS conference “Statistical Physics of Complex Systems” at SISSA/ICTP Trieste, 8-10 September 2021.
Albert-László
Barabási (Northeastern University and Harvard Medical School, Boston
& Central European University, Budapest)
was awarded the prize “for
his pioneering contributions to the development of complex network
science, in particular for his seminal work on scale-free networks, the
preferential attachment model, error and attack tolerance in complex
networks, controllability of complex networks, the physics of social
ties, communities, and human mobility patterns, genetic, metabolic, and
biochemical networks, as well as applications in network biology and
network medicine”.
Barabási is a pioneer in network science.
He played a leading role in the development of this new area of science,
not only at its beginning, but also taking an active part in many of
its major advances and breakthroughs in the past two decades. His first
breakthrough was presented at the turn of the century, in 1999, with the
discovery (together with Reka Albert) that many real-world networks
exhibit a scale-free structure, with the number of interactions of each
component spanning orders of magnitude. This discovery exposed a deep
universality, observed in networks from social, biological and
technological domains. In a broader perspective, this discovery in 1999
is often considered as the birth of network science. He went further to
introduce a statistical physics model for the emergence of scale-free
phenomena, the preferential attachment model, one of the most cited
papers in the history of physics. His work has connected researchers
from different disciplines in an interdisciplinary way. In biology – his
work has shown the crucial role of genetic, metabolic and biochemical
networks in modeling cellular processes. In medicine – he has introduced
the concept of network medicine, linking pathologies based on
shared genetic roots, and predicting novel therapeutics. In social
systems – his works have uncovered the underlying physics of social ties, communities and human mobility patterns.
The
impact of Barabási’s research activity is well beyond the borders of
physics, touching many interdisciplinary fields, representing a major
extension in the range of applicability of statistical physics,
reflected by the 270000 citations that his work has received. It
embraces a vast array of research areas including social network
analysis, internet and information technology, and biology and medicine.
He contributed to the evidence that the scaling of networks is not a
feature of man-made systems only, but characterizes e.g. metabolic
networks as well. Today the concepts and tools introduced by him in
network science are used on a daily basis by a huge number of scientists
to study the millions of networks characterizing living and man-made
complex systems.
Angelo Vulpiani (Sapienza University, Rome)
was award the prize “for
his seminal contributions to statistical and nonlinear physics,
touching fundamentally important issues in dynamical systems theory and
statistical mechanics, including the mechanism of stochastic resonance,
multifractality of invariant sets of dynamical systems, the dynamics and
multifractal properties of turbulent flows, chaos in Hamiltonian
systems, and the limits of predictability in complex systems”.
Vulpiani
is an outstanding physicist who has made seminal contributions to
statistical and nonlinear physics. His research interests are
distinguished by their strong connection to fundamental issues of
statistical mechanics and to the works of classics like Boltzmann,
Kolmogorov and Khinchin.
Over the years he has also built up a
strong environment in Rome with many young researchers who have gone on
to contribute elsewhere. Furthermore, he is a prolific author of books
for the general scientific public, both in Italian and in English, as
well as the author of several well-regarded monographs. His immense
productivity is reflected by almost 500 co-authored scientific
publications. Most relevant, some of his works mark major
break-throughs in their field or have opened up completely new fields of
research. The most prominent example is stochastic resonance which, in
1981, was introduced by him together with Roberto Benzi, Alfonso Sutera,
and the current (2021) physics nobel prize winner Giorgio Parisi. This
developed into an immensely active research area afterwards.
In
1984, Vulpiani (together with Paladin) showed that multifractality
(originally defined by Mandelbrot in a purely mathematical setting) is
of relevance for the characterization of invariant sets in dynamical
systems, and also in turbulent flows. Today, the concept of
multifractality is an inherent part of dynamical systems theory and also
highly relevant for data analysis, where it has moved into the time
domain, i.e. it is used to characterize a variety of measured time
series observed in many applications. Other important works of his are
his contributions to chaos in Hamiltonian systems and the equipartition
of energy (follow-ups of the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam problem), his
contributions to diffusion and transport in various nonlinear settings,
and his repeated efforts to understanding, defining, and investigating
complexity in general.
The prizes of the Division also contain the
EPS-SNPD Early Career Prize, which is traditionally shared by two
younger scientists and which was also awarded in Trieste. This year the
prize went to Federico Battiston and Caterina De Bacco.
Federico Battiston (Central European University, Vienna)
was honoured for “for
his outstanding work on nonlinear dynamics and emergent collective
phenomena in multilayer and higher-order networks, including diffusion,
synchronization, social and evolutionary processes”.
Caterina De Bacco (Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tuebingen)
was honoured for “her
outstanding work on statistical physics of random walkers on random
graphs, stochastic search processes, routing optimization on networks
and effective algorithms for community detection”.
Due
to the Covid-19 situation, the conference in Trieste was a hybrid
conference, with many participants participating online, but some
participants being present in person as well. The photograph shows the
prize winners and some members of the Board of the EPS Statistical and
Nonlinear Physics Division. From left to right: Federico Battiston, Erik
Aurell, Angelo Vulpiani, Albert-László Barabási (on screen), Christian Beck, Caterina De Bacco, Raul Toral, Guido Caldarelli.
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