Giorgio Parisi and the physics of complexity

“Giorgio Parisi and the physics of complexity” is a documentary by Gian Luca Bianco and Eugenio Alberti Schatz with the participation of Mirco Rubegni on trumpet, shot in 2013 at the Institute of Physics of La Sapienza University in Rome. Giorgio Parisi is a physicist who deals with complexity. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, he manages to explain the difficult concepts that have kept him busy for decades with a charming simplicity and sympathy. The results that have made Giorgio Parisi internationally known concern mainly disordered systems and spin glasses, a class of models of statistical mechanics of which Parisi himself has provided numerous applications in optimization theory, biology and immunology. Remarkable are also his contributions in the field of elementary particle physics, in particular quantum chromodynamics and string theory. He teaches Statistical Mechanics. Together with Carlo Rubbia, he is the only Italian member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. At the age of thirty he became member of Accademia dei Lincei. He has been awarded the Boltzmann Medal, the Dirac Prize, the Galileo Prize, the Lagrange Prize and the Max Planck Medal, which he shows at the end of the film. He was recently awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics.