One of the leading international experts in disordered systems, Prof Dr Marc Mézard, will be working as a guest at the Carl von Ossietzky University from July to December 2009
. The stay in the "Computer-Oriented Theoretical Physics" working group headed by Prof. Dr Alexander Hartmann will take place on the occasion of a Humboldt Research Award, which Prof. Mézard received this year. With this award, the foundation honours the overall achievements of leading research personalities to date. Prof Mézard works as "Directeur de Recherche" at the University of Paris South. The physicist received his doctorate from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1984, spent three years as a post-doctoral researcher at the University "La Sapienza" in Rome and, since his return to France, has held a position at the French national research centre CNRS and is a professor at the Ecole Polytechnique (Paris). For almost 30 years, Mézard has been one of the most important authorities in the field of the physics of disordered systems. His work has contributed ground-breaking results to the theory of spin glasses (magnetic alloys such as iron-gold), in particular to so-called "ultrametricity". He has developed the "cavity approach", a very powerful solution method in statistical physics. He has also recently developed new optimisation algorithms based on the principles of statistical physics. These algorithms can be used to solve optimisation problems of unprecedented size. During his stay in Oldenburg, Prof Mézard will work together with Oldenburg researchers on various problems in statistical physics, such as transport problems in disordered systems, spinglass systems with extreme distributions, problems from graph theory and coding theory. Prof Mézart will also be involved as a lecturer during the "Modern Computational Science" summer school, which will take place in Oldenburg in the second half of August.