Monday, November 1, 2021

How are Disordered Magnets and Wedding Seating Charts Connected?

Giorgio Parisi's work, which won him a share of the 2021 Nobel Prize in physics, has a surprisingly wide range of applications.

Image credits: Nana_studio/Shutterstock

How are Disordered Magnets and Wedding Seating Charts Connected?

Giorgio Parisi's work, which won him a share of the 2021 Nobel Prize in physics, has a surprisingly wide range of applications.

Will Sullivan, Staff Writer

November 1, 2021

                                                                                                                                                                              

(Inside Science) -- Earlier this month, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded half of the Nobel Prize in physics to Giorgio Parisi, an Italian physicist. The academy highlighted his method for solving a problem connected to models of spin glasses, magnetic materials lacking the ordered structure of other magnets.


While this research may sound more niche than the climate modeling that won the other half of the Nobel, "spin glass methods have now been used successfully to understand important questions" in subjects including information theory, electrical engineering and theoretical computer science, said Aukosh Jagannath, a mathematician at the University of Waterloo in Ontario...

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