Salvatore Torquato


Salvatore Torquato is an American theoretical scientist born in Falerna, Italy. His research work has impacted a variety of fields, including physics,
chemistry, applied and pure mathematics, materials science, engineering, and biological physics. He is the Lewis Bernard Professor of Natural Sciences in the Department of Chemistry and Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials at Princeton University. He has been a Senior Faculty Fellow in the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science, an enterprise dedicated to exploring frontiers across the theoretical natural sciences. He is also an Associated Faculty Member in three departments or programs at Princeton University: Physics, Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics, and Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering. On multiple occasions, he was a Member of the School of Mathematics as well as the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.

Research accomplishments

Torquato's research work is centered in statistical mechanics and soft condensed matter theory. A common theme of his research is the search for unifying and rigorous principles to elucidate a broad range of physical and biological phenomena.
Torquato has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the randomness of condensed phases of matter through the identification of sensitive order metrics. He is one of the world's experts on packing problems, including pioneering the notion of the "maximally random jammed" state of particle packings, identifying a Kepler-like conjecture for the densest packings of nonspherical particles, and providing strong theoretical evidence that the densest sphere packings in high dimensions are counterintuitively disordered, not ordered as in our three-dimensional world. He has devised the premier algorithm to reconstruct microstructures of random media. Torquato formulated the first comprehensive cellular automaton model of cancer growth. He has made seminal contributions to the study of random heterogeneous materials, including writing the highly acclaimed treatise on this subject called "Random Heterogeneous Materials." He is one of the world's authorities on "materials by design" using optimization techniques, including "inverse" statistical mechanics. More recently he introduced a new exotic state of matter called "disordered hyperuniformity", which is intermediate between a crystal and liquid. These states of matter are endowed with novel physical properties.
A recent study has uncovered that the prime numbers in certain large intervals possess unanticipated order across length scales and represent the first example of a new class of many-particle systems with pure point diffraction patterns, which are called effectively limit-periodic.
Currently, his published work has been cited over 35,600 times and his h-index is 98 according to his Google Scholar page.

Honors and awards

Torquato is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He is the recipient of the 2017 ASC Joel Henry Hildebrand Award, the 2009 APS David Adler Lectureship Award in Material Physics, SIAM Ralph E. Kleinman Prize, Society of Engineering Science William Prager Medal and ASME Richards Memorial Award. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and was thrice a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study. He recently received a Simons Foundation Fellowship in Theoretical Physics.

Publications