Strokes against stroke—strokes for strides

This keynote paper is divided into two parts. On the one hand, it explores how the modeling of pen strokes can be exploited to design biomedical tools allowing the analysis of neuromuscular systems with the objective of developing a diagnostic protocol useful in assessing brain stroke risk factors. On the other hand, it explains how the methodology followed to model a neuromuscular system producing handwriting strokes can be generalized, by means of various strides, to model the Solar System, the Milky Way and the whole Universe. The conducting thread that links up such apparently unrelated pattern recognition problems is the Central Limit Theorem.