Appears in collection : Séminaire Mathematic Park

More than 200 years ago, the Gaussian distribution was discovered by De Moivre (and again by Laplace) from analyzing the binominal distribution arising from coin flips. This distribution is the basis for classical statistics and arises is many different types of physical and mathematical systems. There are, however, many systems for which classical statistics fails and new distributions arise. These distributions are also universal within certain classes of systems. In this talk we will begin to describe where these universal probability distributions come from, what they describe and why they are important. We will touch on many applications such as big data, random growth, traffic flow and more.