Terence Tao

I mean, so the thing about mathematics is that it's really good at spotting connections between what you might think of as completely different things

problems.

But if the mathematical form is the same, you can draw a connection.

So there's a lot of work previously on what's called cellular automata, the most famous of which is Conway's Game of Life.

There's this infinite discrete grid, and at any given time, the grid is either occupied by a cell or it's empty.

And there's a very simple rule that tells you how these cells evolve.

So sometimes cells live and sometimes they die.

And when I was a student, it was a very popular screensaver to actually just have these animations going.

And they look very chaotic.

In fact, they look a little bit like turbulent flow sometimes.

But at some point, people discovered more and more interesting structures within this game of life.

So, for example, they discovered this thing called a glider.

So a glider is a very tiny configuration of like four or five cells.

which evolves and it just moves at a certain direction.

That's like this vortex rings.

This is an analogy.

The Game of Life is a discrete equation and the fluid Navier-Stokes is a continuous equation, but mathematically, they have some similar features.

And so all the time people discovered more and more interesting things that you could build within the game of life.

The game of life is a very simple system.

It only has like three or four rules to do it.