Marc Jean Mezard

I am a Professor of Theoretical Physics. I studied physics at Ecole normale supérieure in Paris and I obtained my PhD in 1984. Hired at CNRS in Paris, I was Research Director in Université Paris Sud. From 2012 and 2022 I became Director of Ecole normale supérieure, and I then joined Bocconi University as a professor, in the newly created department of computational sciences.  My work focuses on statistical physics of disordered systems, with applications in various fields like information theory, computer science, machine learning, biophysics.

Full Professor
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About

Creating a largely interdisciplinary new department of computational sciences, with colleagues from mathematics, physics, computer science, computational biology, is an exciting new challenge.

Research interests

I am interested in the emergent phenomena in complex systems with many interacting “atoms” (that could be for instance agents on a market, information bits, or molecules) that are different or live in different environments. The statistical physics of disordered systems that I contribute to develop finds applications in various branches of science – biology, economics and finance, information theory, computer science, statistics, signal processing. In recent years my research has focused on information processing in neural networks, machine learning and deep networks. I am particularly interested in the theoretical impact of data structure on learning strategies and generalization performance.

Selected Publications

I teach quantum and statistical physics at the undergrad level, and a doctoral course on complex systems in information theory, computer science, and physics.