Yule Heibel's Library tagged random_matrix_theory → View Popular, Search in Google

Jul

2009

Thought-provoking post about "random matrix theory."

www.technologyreview.com/...23844

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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.
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- 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?

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