User:StatMechbytheLake/Antonio Politi

Antonio Politi (born 1955) is an Italian physicist, Professor Emeritus at the University of Aberdeen and associate researcher at the Institute for Complex Systems (CNR-ISC). Politi is well known for his seminal work in nonlinear and statistical physics, ranging from the characterisation of spatio-temporal chaotic systems through their  Lyapunov spectrum to the study of anomalous thermal conductivity.

Career and awards
Antonio Politi worked for 30 years at the National Institute of Optics and at at the Institute for Complex Systems (CNR) in Florence, before accepting in 2011 the 6th Century chair in Physics of Life Science at the University of Aberdeen, where he also directed the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics. He has been a visiting Professor at several European and US academic institutions and at the IBM European Laboratory. Politi become Emeritus in 2022 to return as associate scientist to the Institute for Complex Systems in Florence.

He is the author of two books (Complexity: Hierarchical Structures and Scaling in Physics with R. Badii and Lyapunov Exponents: A Tool to Explore Complex Dynamics with A. Pikovsky) and over 200 scientific papers.

Politi served for almost 25 years as Associate editor of Physical Review E, the first non-US scientist to do so. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (UK) and of the American Physical Society and was awarded the Humboldt Prize and the Gutzwiller Prize by the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex systems in Dresden to acknowledge and promote exceptional research in the field of nonlinear dynamics in complex systems.

Research
The characterisation of nonlinear dynamics and complex systems represents the backbone of Antonio Politi’s research activity, which gradually shifted from low-dimensional systems to the study of space-time chaos and out-of-equilibrium statistical models, with an increasing interest in neurosciences and biological systems.

Politi provided seminal contributions to the study of space-time chaos (extensivity of the Lyapunov spectrum, chronotopic approach, stable chaos) and to the problem of anomalous heat conduction in low-dimensional systems.

More recently, he developed a powerful algorithm to compute in practice the so-called covariant Lyapunov vectors, formally defined by D. Ruelle in the `70s. They are now a standard tool to investigate deviations from hyperbolicity and the presence of collective dynamics.

Selected publications

 * R. Livi, A. Politi, S. Ruffo "Distribution of characteristic exponents in the thermodynamic limit" J. Phys. A 19, 2033 (1986). DOI: 10.1088/0305-4470/19/11/012


 * P. Grassberger, R. Badii, A. Politi "Scaling laws for invariant measures on hyperbolic and non-hyperbolic attractors", J. Stat. Phys. 51, 135 (1988). DOI: 10.1007/BF01015324


 * A. Politi, R. Livi, G.-L. Oppo, R. Kapral "Unpredictable behaviour of stable systems" Europhys. Lett. 22, 571 (1993). DOI: 10.1209/0295-5075/22/8/003


 * G. Giacomelli, A. Politi "Relationship between delayed and spatially extended systems" Phys. Rev. Lett. 76, 2686 (1996). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.76.2686


 * S. Lepri, A. Politi, A. Torcini "Chronotopic Lyapunov analysis: (I) A comprehensive characterization of 1D systems" J. Stat. Phys. 82, 1429 (1996). DOI: 10.1007/BF02183390


 * S. Lepri, R. Livi, A. Politi "Heat Conduction in Chains of Nonlinear Oscillators" Phys. Rev. Lett. 78, 1896 (1997). DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.78.1896


 * R. Badii, A. Politi Complexity: hierarchical structures and scaling in physics (Cambridge University Press ,1997). ISBN: 9780521663854


 * F. Ginelli, P. Poggi, A. Turchi, H. Chaté, R. Livi, A. Politi "Characterizing dynamics with covariant Lyapunov vectors" Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 130601 (2007). DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.99.130601


 * S. Olmi, A. Politi, A. Torcini "Collective chaos in pulse-coupled neural networks" Europhys. Lett. 92 (6), 60007 (2011). DOI: 10.1209/0295-5075/92/60007


 * A. Pikovsky, A. Politi Lyapunov exponents: a Tool to Explore Complex Dynamics (Cambridge University Press, 2017). DOI:10.1017/CBO9781139343473