Loup Verlet, one of the founding fathers of computational Statistical Mechanics, passed away on June 13th 2019, at the age of 88.
To commemorate his exceptional scientific contributions and outstanding human qualities, a one-day Colloquium will be held at Ecole Normale Supérieure (salle Dussane, 45 rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris), on January 22nd, 2020.
A list of speakers can already be found on this site. The detailed program will be posted at a later stage.
Registration
Registration is free but compulsory -- not only to allow the organizers to plan the buffet lunch (which will take place in the library of the Chemistry Department), but also for participants to be allowed into the ENS on the day of the Colloquium. Registration will be available on a first come, first served basis, until the number of participants reaches the capacity of the conference room. Please see the corresponding page on this website. If you don't already have an account on sciencesconf.org, you will need to create one to register.
From Physics to Psychiatry, environmental and social issues, as well as Epistemology
After early work and a PhD on high Energy Physics at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, Loup switched to Statistical Mechanics of fluids, focussing on fluid integral équations, in particular HNC, and their numerical solution when the ENS theory group moved to the Orsay Science Campus in the late fifties.
In 1966 Loup was invited by Joel Lebowitz to New York, where they joined forces with Jerry Percus to lay the theoretical foundations of constant energy Molecular Dynamics (MD) within the microcanonical ensemble. Well aware of Anees Rahman's seminal paper on MD for a LJ fluid, Loup used the CDC computer of the NYU Courant Institute to develop a code based on two fundamental advances, namely the symplectic Verlet algorithm for the integration of coupled equations of motion, and the use of periodically updated neighbour tables, reducing computational times for N-particle systems from N2 to N*ln(N).
On his return to Orsay in 1967, Loup and his students exploited his MD code, as well as related MC codes, to investigate static and dynamical properties of simple and complex, classical and quantum liquids. The Orsay "bee-hive" attracted many distinguished vistors, including Berni Alder, Malvin Kalos, Mark Nelkin, Anees Rahman, George Stell and John Valleau.
After 1974 Loup's interest turned to psychiatry, environmental and social issues, as well as epistemology. On the latter subject he wrote two influential books: "La Malle de Newton" (1992) and "Chimères et Paradoxes" (2007).
Chargement... 
