Miguel Virasoro

He has been Director of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) since 1995. Specialised in particle physics and field theory (the Virasoro algebra is at the origin of string theory), he later became interested in statistical mechanics and problems of complexity from fractals to spin glasses and neural networks. He has worked and taught in Israel, the United States, and France at CERN in Geneva and from 1977 in Italy, first at the INFN in Turin, then at the University of Lecce and, from 1982, at the University of Rome La Sapienza as professor of theoretical physics. In 1989, he published, with Giorgio Parisi and Marc Mezard, Spin Glass Theory and Beyond.