The juxtaposition of 'machine learning' and 'pure mathematics and theoretical physics' may first appear as contradictory in terms. The rigours of proofs and derivations in the latter seem to reside in a different world from the randomness of data and statistics in the former. Yet, an often under-appreciated component of mathematical discovery, typically not presented in a final draft, is experimentation: both with ideas and with mathematical data. Think of the teenage Gauss, who conjectured the Prime Number Theorem by plotting the prime-counting function, many decades before complex analysis...