Scientists still lack a fundamental understanding of how and when complex many-body systems out of equilibrium will relax back to thermal equilibrium. Empirically, many systems do relax readily, justifying many of the core approximations of thermodynamics. Read more

Many insights have recently emerged from applications of extreme value theory to the study of time series generated by dynamical systems. Read more

Since the outbreak of the coronavirus, modellers from around the world have scrambled to predict the course of its spread, projecting forward from data on past infections and deaths in any region. Such estimates help public health officials and governments to judge the possible risks they face, and, on their basis, many nations have imposed restrictive social confinement measures. Read more

Random graphs can undergo structural phase transitions as a function of their model parameters. For example, in the well-known percolation transition, a network-spanning cluster of linked nodes abruptly appears at a critical value of the probability, c, for a link to exist between any pair of nodes. Read more

Uncertain programs are optimization problems involving uncertainties in constraints or objectives. In the past few decades, such programs have been applied in areas from economics and management to automotive control and machine learning. Read more