Ok, this is gonna be a bit scary, because I’m gonna be introducing a technical paper here. But fear not, this is pretty readable in its important sections. (Feel free to gloss over the discussions of correlation functions and random matrices, if you don’t feel up to speed in statistics.)

There are some seriously cool examples, such as analyzing the behavior of passengers boarding a plane, and of bunching phenomena in public transport. (An example of the latter is a bus system with no fixed timetables, resulting in long times between buses and several times when three buses come at the same time to the same bus stop.)

P Deift, Universality for mathematical and physical systems
All physical systems in equilibrium obey the laws of thermodynamics. In other words, whatever the precise nature of the interaction between the atoms and molecules at the microscopic level, at the macroscopic level, physical systems exhibit universal behavior in the sense that they are all governed by the same laws and formulae of thermodynamics. In this paper we describe some recent history of universality ideas in physics starting with Wigner’s model for the scattering of neutrons off large nuclei and show how these ideas have led mathematicians to investigate universal behavior for a variety of mathematical systems. This is true not only for systems which have a physical origin, but also for systems which arise in a purely mathematical context such as the Riemann hypothesis, and a version of the card game solitaire called patience sorting.