KPZ story

The celebrated KPZ equation (Kardar, Parisi, Zhang, 1986) is an
important  milestone in statistical physics, originally introduced to
describe the  late time dynamics in two dimensional growth models. Over
the last 30  years, the KPZ story has evolved in various interesting
directions, making links on the way to different areas of physics and
mathematics. This  includes in particular the link to the famous
Tracy-Widom distribution in  random matrix theory. The story of KPZ is a
very successful one, involving theoretical physics, mathematics and
experiments--a fertile playground for interdisciplinary science. In this
talk, I will review the evolution of  the KPZ story, pointing out the
important landmarks as I go along. At the  very end, I will discuss some
recent developments establishing a nice link between the KPZ height
fluctuations and the edge physics in cold atom  systems.