  Improving the accuracy and thus broadening the applicability of electronic
density functional theory (DFT) is crucial to many research areas, from
material science, to theoretical chemistry, biophysics and biochemistry. In the
last three years, the mathematical structure of the strong-interaction limit of
density functional theory has been uncovered, and exact information on this
limit has started to become available. The aim of this paper is to give a
perspective on how this new piece of exact information can be used to treat
situations that are problematic for standard Kohn-Sham DFT. One way to use the
strong-interaction limit, more relevant for solid-state physical devices, is to
define a new framework to do practical, non-conventional, DFT calculations in
which a strong-interacting reference system is used instead of the traditional
non-interacting one of Kohn and Sham. Another way to proceed, more related to
chemical applications, is to include the exact treatment of the
strong-interaction limit into approximate exchange-correlation energy density
functionals in order to describe difficult situations such as the breaking of
the chemical bond.
