Name Yoshitsugu Oono
Department Department of Mathematics, School of Fundamental Science and Technology/
Department of Physics and Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Ph.D. (Kyusyu University)
Research Fields statistical physics in the broadest sense
URL  

Research Interest
As a statistical physicist/applied mathematical physicist I am interested in the foundational questions of statistical physics in general and in expanding its scope. Statistical physics is a discipline trying to find relations between two disparate levels of description of systems and phenomena; traditionally, they are microscopic and macroscopic levels, but now the levels may be individuals vs polulations or genotypes vs phenotypes. I realized long ago that phenomenological approaches and the renormalization group (RG) methods supporting the former were crucial, and have been developing systematic ways to apply the basic philosophy of RG to asymptotic analysis of systems described/modeled in terms of differential equations and to coarse-grained computational methods.

Plans related to COE
Within the Keio COE Integrative Mathematical Sciences Program I am trying to apply the reductive RG ideas to progressively complicated systems in order to extract their global and salient features. The project is in harmony with the one being pursued at the Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois. Since the fundamental idea of RG is to extract structurally stable features of the system or those of the observed data, RG must have a close relation with data science. As is well known, central limit theorems are prototypical examples of RG theories. Thus, to explore relations between the system reduction on the applied mathematicians' side and the data reduction/mining on the statisticians' side is also my major research concern. Inavitably, mathematical problems related to biology would be my main target problems. There are two aspects. One is the development of mathematical tools. This is exactly what I have been doing. The other is to construct the mathematical theory of biology that is, so to speak, a counterpart of the theory of computation in computer science. I have been advocating that the study of complex systems is nothing but the mathematical study of biology. Efforts in this direction will be initiated in earnest.