This lecture is celebrating the 70th birthday of Dan-Virgil Voiculescu by giving a glimpse into his great mathematical discovery:

free probability theory.

Free probability theory connects theoretical mathematics, like operator algebras, to very applied questions from wireless networks, machine learning, and statistics. This bridge rests quite substantially on another present hot topic in mathematics: random matrices.

In this lecture I will try to give an idea of what all this means and why it is so exciting.

This talk is intented for a general academic audience with some interest in what is going on in mathematics, as well as for mathematicans who always wanted to know what free probability is about; or actually for anybody who wonders why we should liberate probability from its commutative chains, whether there are non-commutative dice, why we should care about random matrices, or whether there is actually a free lunch in free probability.