SPECIAL LECTURE

I will present a recent joint work with Ya.G. Sinai. We investigate the ``randomness" of the classical Möbius function by means of a statistical mechanical model for square-free numbers and we prove some new results, including a non-standard limit theorem where the Dickman-De Bruijn distribution appears. Although we use a probabilistic approach, this work is inspired by a conjecture by P. Sarnak, and by a number of recent results relating Number Theory and Ergodic Theory.