The Curious Link Between Parked Cars and Perched Birds (Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog)

Yule Heibel's personal annotations on this page

Lampertina bookmarked on 2009-07-19 mit_techreview math statistics random_matrix_theory petr_seba

Thought-provoking post about "random matrix theory."

He has measured the gaps between parked cars and says that the
statistical patterns in the data bear an uncanny likeness to those in
the distances between perched birds.
Šeba has stumbled across a
deep connection between the statistics of seemingly unrelated
phenomena. It has been known for some time that the statistics
associated with the gaps between parked cars can be described by a
branch of mathematics known as random matrix theory.
In 2006, Percy Deift from the Courant Institute of Mathematical
Sciences, in New York, even went so far as to say that random matrix theory
may play the same role in mathematics as thermodynamics does in the
physical world. In other words, random matrix theory is a
manifestation of some fundamental universal property of mathematics.

That is a profound idea that leads to many fascinating questions.
For example, if seemingly unrelated phenomena can be linked by the
mathematics of random matrix theory, are they also linked in some
physical way?

And if so, what then links the real world governed by physical
laws and the nonphysical world of mathematical patterns?

This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 19 Jul 2009, by Yule Heibel.