Colloquium 3 June

David Wolpert, an American mathematician, physicist and computer scientist, will be the featured speaker at an upcoming Joint ICTP/SISSA Colloquium titled 'The Stochastic Thermodynamics of Computation'.

The colloquium takes place Wednesday 3 June at 16:00. It will be presented as an online webinar; see details on how to register. It will also be livestreamed on ICTP's YouTube channel.All are welcome to attend.

In his talk, Wolpert will address the limitations of Landauer and colleagues' research on the thermodynamics of computation. That research was done when non-equilibrium statistical physics was still in its infancy, severely limiting the scope and formal detail of their analyses.

According to Wolpert's abstract, recent breakthroughs in non-equilibrium statistical physics hold the promise of allowing us to go beyond those limitations. He will present some initial results along these lines, concerning the entropic costs of running (loop-free) digital circuits and Turing machines. These results reveal new, challenging engineering problems for how to design computers to have minimal thermodynamic costs. They also allow us to start to combine computer science theory and stochastic thermodynamics at a foundational level, thereby expanding both.

Wolpert is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and the author of three books, three patents, and more than one hundred refereed papers.