"How do mathematicians get to know each other? Professional psychologists do not seem to have studied this question; I will try out an amateur theory. When two

"How do mathematicians get to know each other? Professional psychologists do not seem to have studied this question; I will try out an amateur theory. When two mathematicians meet and feel out each other’s knowledge of mathematics, what they are really doing is finding out what each other’s bottom line is. It might be interesting to give a precise definition of a bottom line; in the absence of a definition, we will give some typical examples." "I will shamelessly tell you what my bottom line is. It is placing balls into boxes, or, as Florence Nightingale David put it with exquisite tact in her book Combinatorial Chance, it is the theory of distribution and occupancy." G-C Rota https://cadadr.org/san-salvador/algebra/bottom-lines.pdf https://cadadr.org/san-salvador/algebra/bottom-lines.pdf Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balls_into_bins_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balls_into_bins_problem