CWI — The 2002 Brouwer Memorial Medal was awarded to Michael Aizenman of Princeton University on April 4, during the annual Dutch Mathematical Congress in Eindhoven. Aizenman’s research focuses on systems with many degrees of freedom, in particular critical behaviour and disorder, both classical and quantum-mechanical. Most phenomena in this area do not allow analytical solutions, and also perturbation theory breaks down. Nonetheless Aizenman could provide answers on central questions regarding such phenomena. The Brouwer Medal, named after the famous Dutch mathematician L.E.J. Brouwer (1881-1966) and awarded every three years, can be considered as the Dutch version of the Fields Medal, which is often called the Nobel Prize in mathematics. In his lecture following the award, Aizenman addressed stochastic geometry and interacting fields.