Once upon a time, Theoretical Physics was a very aristocratic field, more often than not auto-referential. Now, thanks to Molecular Simulation, it has invaded fields going from chemistry/materials science (soft and hard) to geology and biology, realising directly the old dream of Francis Bacon.
Giovanni Ciccotti is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Roma, where taught for 40 years in the departments of genetics and physics. Ciccotti is also co-investigator on the epistemology and history of Molecular Simulation project with University of Chicago faculty Benoit Roux and Stephen Stigler. The focus of Ciccotti’s research is developing algorithms for Molecular Dynamics simulation of complex systems in condensed phases. From the, now ancient, SHAKE algorithm (a procedure to introduce holonomic constraints in MD) or the Subtraction Technique (a noise reducing approach to compute the response to weak external fields in Nonequilibrium MD) to the introduction of the Blue Moon’s ensemble (to simulate in MD rare events) and techniques to simulate Brownian motion to the most recent, and still very active, field of rigorous algorithms to compute nonadiabatic quantum-classical dynamics, the attempt is to widen the domain of computer simulation in condensed matter with a particular emphasis on MD (as distinguished from the very close but different MC- Monte Carlo).