Asteroids and Least Squares

Eugene Wigner (1902–1995), who was awarded the 1963 Nobel Prize for Physics, wrote an article in 1960 that has since become a classic, titled: “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”. In Wigner’s words: “There is a story about two friends, who were classmates in high school, talking about their jobs. One of them became a statistician and was working on population trends. He showed an scientific article to his former classmate. The article included, not unusually, the Gaussian distribution. The statistician explained to his former classmate the meaning of the symbols for actual population, for average population, and so on. His classmate was a bit incredulous and was not quite sure whether the statistician was pulling his leg. ‘How can you know that?’ was his query. ‘And what is this symbol here?’ ‘Oh’, said the statistician, ‘this is pi.’ ‘What is that?’ ‘The ratio of the circumference of the circle to its diameter.’ ‘Well, now you are pushing your joke too far’, said the classmate, ‘surely the population has nothing to do with the circumference of the circle’”.