From rotating needles to stability of waves; emerging connections   between combinatorics, analysis and PDE
  We survey the interconnections between geometric combinatorics (such as the Kakeya problem), arithmetic combinatorics (such as the classical problem of determining which sets contain arithmetic progressions), oscillatory integrals (such as the Bochner-Riesz, restriction, and local smoothing problems), and the local and global well-posedness theory for non-linear dispersive and wave equations. 
Terence Tao