Perspectives and challenges in statistical physics and complex systems for the next decade

Statistical Physics (SP) has followed an unusual evolutionary path in science. Originally aiming to provide a fundamental basis for another important branch of Physics, namely Thermodynamics, SP gradually became an independent field of research in its own right. But despite more than a century of steady progress, there are still plenty of challenges and open questions in the SP realm. In fact, the area is still rapidly evolving, in contrast to other branches of science, which already have well defined scopes and borderlines of applicability. This difference is due to the steadily expanding num