Exotic statistical physics: Applications to biology, medicine, and economics

This manuscript is based on four opening lectures, which were designed to offer a brief and somewhat parochial overview of some “exotic” statistical physics puzzles of possible interest to biophysicists, medical physicists, and econophysicists. These include the statistical properties of DNA sequences, heartbeat intervals, brain plaques in Alzheimer brains, and fluctuations in economics. These problems have the common feature that the guiding principles of scale invariance and universality appear to be relevant.