Statistical Physics & Complex Systems

Diplome(s)
Lieu
ENS-PSL
Printemps- Eté
Niveau Master 2 3 ECTS - En anglais
Cours en option pour le parcours théorique
Enseignant(s) Camille SCALLIET ( ENS-PSL CNRS ) Julien RANDON-FURLING
Contact - Secrétariat de l’enseignement

Tél : + 33 (1) 44 32 35 60  
enseignement@phys.ens.fr

 

In this course, you will learn tools and ideas developed by statistical physics to deal with "complex systems". These tools can be used in different contexts, including economics and social sciences where the modelling of collective phenomena, crises, panics, and discontinuities, is more necessary than ever.

Practical
  • Who?
     

Julien Randon-Furling, ENS Paris-Saclay (julien.randon-furling@ens-paris-saclay.fr) 

Camille Scalliet, ENS, CNRS (camille.scalliet@phys.ens.fr)

 

  • When?
     

Wednesdays 9:00 - 12:30.

Dates : 14, 21, 28 January, 4, 11, 18 February, 4, 11, 18 March 

 

  •  Where?


Sorbonne Université Campus, room to be determined. 

Syllabus
  1. General Introduction & Scope of the lectures
     
  2. Mild fluctuations vs. Wild fluctuations
  • Introduction: Thin tails/Fat tails, scale invariance
  • The « problem » with power-laws: concentration/localisation, generalised CLT
  • Scenarii for power-laws, universality?
     
  1. Multiplicative growth models for population
  • Uncorrelated growth, log-normal fluctuations
  • Sums of log-normals & condensation
  • Growth with redistribution/mixing
  • Continuous limit & the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman method 
     
  1. Networks
  • Erdos-Renyi networks, percolation, branching process
  • Growing networks, scale-free networks
  • Resilience, breakdown, epidemics
  • Firm Networks
     
  1. Interactions, instabilities & collective effects
  • The Curie-Weiss paradigm: self-fulfilling prophecies, hysteresis
  • The Random Ising Field Model paradigm: crises & sudden opinion shifts
  • Optimisation vs. Resilience
  • Temporal criticality: synchronization, failures
     
  1. Random Matrices
  • Introduction
  • The Wigner Semi-Circle
  • Dyson Brownian motion & Free Random Matrices
  • Random Covariance Matrices
  • Network Matrices & Economic Stability
Prerequisites

Taste for modelling, probabilities and statistics.