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On the central role of the scale invariant Poisson processes on (0,infty)

The scale invariant Poisson processes on (0,infty) play a central but mildly disguised role in number theory, combinatorics, and genetics. They give the continuous limits which underly and unify diverse discrete structures, including the prime factorization of a uniformly chosen integer, the factorization of polynomials over finite fields, the decomposition into cycles of random permutations, the decomposition into components of random mappings, and the Ewens sampling formula. They deserve attention as one of the fundamental and central objects of probability theory.