Abstract Watkins

It is now more than 100 years since statistician and biometrician Karl Pearson noticed the possible resemblance of animal foraging to Brownian motion. Ever since then a fruitful dialogue has continued between problems in random search and the increasingly sophisticated theories of diffusion in statistical mechanics. This talk will give a personal and informal introduction to topics which later speakers will be treating in detail, and will also touch on one particular area I encountered while visiting PKS and plan to research further in the ASG, Mandelbrot's work in the 60s on the different possible origins of observed "1/f" signatures.