Elizabeth Gardner Lecture - Elizabeth's contributions to the theory of disordered systems and neural networks

For details of the talk see https://higgs.ph.ed.ac.uk/event/elizabeth-gardner-lecture-2024/ (This is a Higgs centre talk).

After her PhD in High Energy Physics at the University of Oxford, Elizabeth Gardner spent two years as a postdoc in the theoretical group at Saclay with the support of a Royal Society Fellowship. It was there where she started to work on the theory of disordered systems and she published well known works on the problem of localization and on the theory of spin glasses. She returned in 1984 to the Unversity of Edinburgh where she made major contributions to the theory of neural networks. The goal of this talk will be to review a number of her main contributions to the theory of disordered systems, many of them being now classics in the physics of the jamming transition and in Artificial Intelligence.