“Weather” records: Musings on cold days after a long hot Indian summer

We present a simple introduction to the statistics of extreme values. Motivated by a string of record high temperatures in December 1998, we consider the distribution, averages, and lifetimes for a simplified model of such “records.” Our data are sequences of independent random numbers all of which are generated from the same probability distribution. A remarkable universality emerges: A number of results, including the lifetime histogram, are universal, that is, independent of the underlying distribution.