
Beyond the Bell Curve, a New Universal Law (2014) - dedalus
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20141015-at-the-far-ends-of-a-new-universal-law/
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chollida1
If anyone wants to dig into this further start here:

[https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~tracy/talks/SITE7.pdf](https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~tracy/talks/SITE7.pdf)

I find it to be a very approachable paper.

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photoJ
Sadly, Leo P. Kadanoff, quoted in the article just passed away.

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deepnet
New paper by Majumdar & Schehr ( who discovered the E^-N^2 vs E^-N asymmetric
tails to the Tracy-Widom Distribution in the OP ) looking for phase
transitions in random walks.

"Random walk with random resetting to the maximum" by Majumdar, Sabhapandit, &
Schehr

[http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.04516](http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.04516)

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mckoss
_" Suitably scaled, its summit sits at a telltale value: √2N"_

Doesn't this statement apply the _any_ function with a maximum?

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rcthompson
"Suitably" doesn't mean "arbitrarily". In this case it probably means
something like "relative to the number of variables, N".

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kordless
I immediately thought of this:
[http://www.enterprisetech.com/2014/05/22/cisco-ceo-
predicts-...](http://www.enterprisetech.com/2014/05/22/cisco-ceo-predicts-
brutal-brutal-consolidation/)

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paulpauper
there already exist methods to generate skewed distributions that are very
similar to the ones shown in the article. not sure how this is new. Skewed
distributions arise form a more general case of the normal distribution but
with added parameters or the use of special functions

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kurlberg
The main point is not about generating skewed distributions, it's about
"universality" \- the same distribution starts popping up in seemingly
unrelated settings. E.g., (large) eigenvalues of random matrices is connected
to the length of the longest increasing subsequence of permutations. In a
sense it's the discovery of a new kind of central limit theorem.

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helmett
As someone who has studied statistics in college, there is little original or
novel about these finding. Any distribution can be reversed-engineered to find
its characteristic function.

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gaze
Yeah but certain characteristic functions popping up in seemingly unrelated
places is a BIG deal.

