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.