In a series of papers in 1978–1983 M. Bramson has obtained the asymptotics for the front location for the solutions of the Fisher-KPP equation for large times. Recently, the same asymptotic behavior has been proved for the solutions of a number of other PDEs, but also in probabilistic models, such as for the maxima of the Riemann zeta function on randomly chosen intervals. I will discuss some of these results.