@mcnees I recently read Emilio Segre’s book X-Rays to Quarks which is fairly well sourced history, and he makes a pretty compelling case that Planck did not make an intuitive leap, but was intitially seeking a calculation trick. In this passage, Segre claims that Plancks sole aim was representing the distribution discretely to obtain an average energy, then taking a limit to recover the continuous distribution.
Segre also documents Planck’s diffidence and resistance to his own idea.

@mcnees Monte Carlo. Can't leave out Monte Carlo, which given its usefulness in extending the time horizon weather prediction, probably has saved millions of lives.

Fusion implosion by radiation transport was gonna happen with or without him, probably.