  We illustrate in this contribution the progress in the theoretical study of
liquid metals made in the last decades, starting from the example of liquid
gallium and the early work in Jean-Pierre Badiali's group. This was based on
the combination of the perturbation theory with pseudo-potentials for the
electrons and the liquid state theory for the ions. More recent developments
combining ab initio and classical molecular dynamics simulations are finally
illustrated on the example of glass forming alloys.
