Elizabeth Gardner (physicist)


Elizabeth Gardner was a British theoretical physicist. She is best known for her groundbreaking work on a phase transition known as the Gardner transition and on disordered networks.

Early life and education

Gardner was born in Cheshire, UK. Both of her parents were chemical engineers. Gardner was interested in science from an early age. In 1975, she enrolled in University of Edinburgh to study mathematical physics. She graduated with first class honors, and was awarded the Tait Medal, Robert Schlapp Prize, and the Class medal.
Gardner completed her D.Phil. studies at Oxford under the supervision of I.J.R. Aitchison. Her thesis was in particle physics, and focused on non-Abelian gauge theories. Despite fulfilling requirements, Gardner did not formally graduate from Oxford.

Career

Following her D.Phil., Gardner moved to University of Paris-Saclay, where she spent two years, supported by a Royal Society Fellowship. She worked on a variety of topics in field theory and the theory of disordered systems, and began to work on spin glasses.
In 1984, Gardner returned to the University of Edinburgh. She was supported initially by the Science and Engineering Research Council to work on particle physics, and later by the university itself to work on disordered systems and neural networks.
In 1985, Gardner published a paper titled "Spin glasses with p-spin interactions," in which she described a phase transition for the first time that is now known as the Gardner transition. At the Gardner transition, a glass becomes marginally stable. The Gardner transition has attracted significant recent attention, as new evidence for it has been discovered through simulations and calculations about jamming of hard spheres.
In 1988, Gardner published two consecutive papers, one with Bernard Derrida, on neural networks. It has received significant attention in recent years, and was recently celebrated as one of the 50 of the most influential papers published in the Journal of Physics A.
Gardner's prolific research career was cut short by cancer. She was first diagnosed in 1986, and died in June 1988.