Dr. Pierpaolo Vivo's team aims at measuring and taming the complexity of the UK legal system advocating a new digital, network-based approach to the visualisation and quantitative analysis of legal provisions.
The research activities of the group concentrate on the analysis and development of mathematical theories and models with which to describe the statics and dynamics of disordered (or “complex”) systems in physics, biology, financial markets, and computer science.
In the domain of physical systems, the question of how to pack spheres optimally is familiar from everyday examples such as a greengrocer’s stack of oranges. But what if the spheres have a range of sizes, as happens for example in colloidal suspensions?
The definition and generation of good null models to assess the statistical relevance of observed features in protein interaction networks (PIN) is a well known problem in systems biology, where the aim is to understand how the structure of PINs relates to their biological functionality.
A collaboration between group members prof. Reimer Kuehn and Dr. Perez Castillo and international collaborators also led to a breakthrough in the spectral problem for sparse symmetric random matrices, allowing to efficiently compute spectral densities of such systems in the limit of large matrix size to any desired accuracy – more than 20 years after a solution to this problem was first attempted.
Prof. Reimer Kühn has provided the first formulation of a microscopic model to describe the emergence of the universal glassy low-temperature anomalies, including an understanding of the origin of the mysterious so-called quantitative universality – a problem that had been open since its formulation in the late 80s.