<p>In the end, it’s because human beings are awesome.</p>
<p>If there’s anything that humans are absolutely fantastic at, it’s pattern recognition. From what I can see, mathematics, as well as science, are all about pattern recognition. It’s then natural that humans can observe and identify similar patterns across fields. Just as math that was developed 50 years ago as part of some pure field is now finding its way into physics, there are physicists who have recently been classifying the riemann zeta function as a partition function (an important concept in thermodynamics).</p>