16th Itzykson Meeting "Extremes and Records", IPhT, Saclay, June 14-17, 2011

The statistics of rare events, and in particular Extreme Value Statistics, is by now a longstanding issue in the fields of engineering, finance or environmental sciences where rare and extreme events may have drastic consequences. After recent significant advances in the theory of complex and disordered systems, Extreme Value Statistics plays now a crucial role in statistical physics. It is thus not surprising that Extreme Value Statistics has emerged as an important problem in various areas of physics such as spin-glasses, fluctuating interfaces, polymers in random media, random binary-tree searches, random growth and combinatorial models and level-density problems of ideal quantum gases amongst others.

For these reasons there is currently a wide interest for the statistics of rare and extreme events in statistical physics. It was in particular realized that, in many cases, the correlations between the different degrees of freedom play a crucial role in the understanding of these extreme fluctuations. Prototypes of such instances are the Tracy-Widom distributions which describe the fluctuations of the largest eigenvalue of Wigner random matrices, and which were found to occur in many different models of statistical physics.

The goal of this conference is to bring together researchers who have made significant progresses in this rapidly evolving field of research.

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