ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Palm–Khintchine theorem

Okay, imagine a jigsaw puzzle made up of a bunch of little squares. Now, let's say that each square has a number on it that tells you how tall it is. These squares are all jumbled up and mixed together, so you can't really tell what the puzzle looks like just by looking at one square.

But, if you take all of the squares and sort them into rows based on their height, you start to see a pattern. You might notice that there is a row of squares that are all the same height, and then a row of squares that are slightly shorter, and then a row of squares that are even shorter.

This is kind of like what the palm-khintchine theorem does, but instead of sorting puzzle pieces by height, it sorts numbers by their frequency. The theorem tells you that if you have a bunch of random numbers, you can group them together based on how often they appear. This helps you to see patterns in the numbers that you might not have noticed before.

So, imagine you have a bunch of numbers that represent the heights of different objects. Some of these objects might be the same height, like a bunch of books stacked on top of each other. Using the palm-khintchine theorem, you can group all of the numbers that represent the height of books together, and then group all of the numbers that represent the height of other objects together. This helps you to see that there is one group of objects that are all the same height, and another group that are all different heights.

Overall, the palm-khintchine theorem helps you to make sense of a bunch of random numbers by showing you which ones are similar to each other, and which ones are different.