Energy landscapes—Past, present, and future: A perspective

Energy landscapes and the closely related cost function landscapes have been recognized in science, mathematics, and various other fields such as economics as being highly useful paradigms and tools for the description and analysis of the properties of many systems, ranging from glasses, proteins, and abstract global optimization problems to business models. A multitude of algorithms for the exploration and exploitation of such landscapes have been developed over the past five decades in the various fields of applications, where many re-inventions but also much cross-fertilization have occurred. Twenty-five years ago, trying to increase the fruitful interactions between workers in different fields led to the creation of workshops and small conferences dedicated to the study of energy landscapes in general instead of only focusing on specific applications. In this perspective, I will present some history of the development of energy landscape studies and try to provide an outlook on in what directions the field might evolve in the future and what larger challenges are going to lie ahead, both from a conceptual and a practical point of view, with the main focus on applications of energy landscapes in chemistry and physics.