Speaker

Masaki Sano

Time

2021.10.27 16：00-17：30

Abstract

The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi for their groundbreaking contributions to the understanding of complex systems. In this lecture, I will explain what complex systems are and how to understand them, based on Nobel Laurates’ work. The understanding of macroscopic complex systems involves difficulties originated from multi-scale space-time fluctuations due to chaos and turbulence. In Earth's climate models and prediction of global warming, it became clear that reliable prediction is possible by separating slowly changing variables from fast changing variables. On the other hand, there is a difficulty in understanding disordered materials such as glasses and spin glasses, because many degrees of freedom interact randomly on multiple scales, and it is not possible to separate variables as was done for macroscopic systems; special methods have been developed to resolve these challenging problems. I will also like to mention that the methods developed to understand random systems are not limited to physics but can also be useful to understand complex phenomena in various apparently different fields such as mathematics, biology, neuroscience, information processing, and machine learning.

Bio

Masaki Sano is a Chair Professor at Institute for Natural Sciences and School of Physics and Astronomy, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He is a leading scientist in the fields of soft matter and complex system and have made fundamental contributions to a wide range of subjects including chaos dynamics, turbulence, fracture propagation, biophysics, statistical physics and active matter. Before joining Shanghai Jiao Tong University, he was a physics professor in University of Tokyo and Tohoku University, served as the founding director of Universal Biology Institute and board members in Japanese Physical Society, Japan Science and Technology, and International Union of Pure and Applied Physics C3 Commission.