Terence Tao

Yeah, the patient doesn't die.

Exactly.

Come on.

Well, increasingly, there's a conversation going in all directions.

So traditionally, pure mathematicians just experiment with patterns.

And based on analogies and intuition they brought up, they propose patterns.

that some phenomenon that they see for one type of pattern also extends to some other setting.

But sometimes it comes from the physical world.

Physicists notice that something keeps happening.

So, for example, there are these laws in physics that seem to be universal, that there are certain distributions, like the bulk of distribution is an example of a universal distribution.

If you plot, say, the heights of people or the size of cows, if you wish.

I am so craving one.

Anyway.

Yeah, but lots of distributions in nature have the same shape, in this case, a bell curve.

There's even a meme about it on the internet.

Yeah, so mathematicians did actually find an explanation for why this curve appears all the time.

It's something called a central limit theorem in probability.

But there are some other distributions that physicists have discovered that we haven't yet fully explained why they show up so often, like gaps between spectral lines.

And it's more technical to explain.

But yeah, there are those that physicists and other scientists have found are universal.