The 2026 Dirac Medal from the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) was awarded in equal shares to Bernard Derrida, professor emeritus at the Collège de France, and Marc Mézard, professor at Bocconi University in Milan, Deepak Dhar, a professor at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in India, and Haim Sompolinsky, a professor of neuroscience and physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a visiting professor at Harvard University.
This honor was awarded to them “for their pioneering contributions to equilibrium statistical mechanics, and for extending its concepts and methods to non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, optimization problems, theoretical neuroscience, and, finally, artificial intelligence.”
It recognizes their exceptional contributions to statistical mechanics—a framework used by physicists to describe the collective behavior of systems comprising a very large number of constituents—and the way they have used it to advance the theory of disordered systems, such as glassy materials, with practical applications ranging from the study of biological systems to the statistics of extreme events and artificial intelligence.
