Recently, Nobel prize in Physics of 2021 has been awards to three scientists, Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann, and Giorgio Parisi, for their contributions in understanding complex physics systems. The Nobel committee releases this upload explaining the background and importance of the contributions.

The report shows that Manabe studies climate models focusing on amostpheric weather (attribution of carbon dioxide to global warming), Hasselmann also works on (ocean) climate in stochastic setting, while Parisi works on spin glasses.

The report discusses the importance of some mathematical tools such as Fokker-Planck equations often found in stochastic calculus. Moreover, it emphasizes the role of Browian motion in Parisi’s work and cite a Nature (short) article about this story and impact of Brownian motion. On the other hand, Hasslmann uses stochastic differential equation (generalized Langevin equation) then studies the spectral information of auto-correlation in dynamic systems.

Final remark

What strikes me is that most of the work was well-established decades ago but is recognized long afterward.

Of course, many things discussed above are out of my expertise. But it’s enlightening to have some read over this topic and to see the connection with the fundamental tool like stochastic calculus, Brownian motion. It is known that the same stochasticity tool is a part of the long-standing results in Black-Scholes models, another Nobel prize work in Economics.