Inaugural Elizabeth Gardner Lecture - Emergent collective behaviour and complexity

Giorgio Parisi (Nobel Prize in Physics 2021) will give the Inaugural Elizabeth Gardner Lecture and will describe one of the underlying mechanisms in the complex cooperative behaviour observed in many natural systems, such as neural networks, biological evolution, glassy materials and protein folding.

"I will discuss the general problem of studying the emergent collective behavior of an assembly of a large number of agents in the framework of statistical mechanics showing a few examples. I will discuss how complexity emerges in that framework.

I will present my viewpoints on complexity stressing the importance of multiple equilibria; I will then recall the genesis of the concept of multiple equilibria in natural sciences.

Finally, I will describe my contribution to the development of this concept in the framework of statistical mechanics and I will briefly mention the cornucopia of applications of these ideas both in physics and in other disciplines."

About Elizabeth Gardner

Elizabeth Gardner (1957 - 1988). Gardner studied Mathematical Physics at the University of Edinburgh, graduating with first class honours, and was awarded the Tait Medal, Robert Schlapp Prize, and the Class Medal. After studying for a DPhil at the University of Oxford, she later returned to the School of Physics and Astronomy in 1984 as a Research Fellow. Her works on the optimal storage of neural networks have been selected as two of the most influential papers in the 50th anniversary of Journal of Physics A.

More about the Elizabeth Gardner Fellowship.