  The beautiful and profound result that the first eigenvalue of Schroedinger
operator can be interpreted as a large deviation of certain kind of Brownian
motion leads to possible existence of universality in the distribution of
ground state energies of quantal systems. Existence of such universality is
explored in the distribution of the ground state energies of nuclei with Z
$\ge$ 8 and N $\ge$ 8. Specifically, it has been demonstrated that the nuclear
masses follow extreme-value statistics, implying that the nuclear ground state
energies indeed can be treated as extreme values in the sense of the large
deviation theory of Donsker and Varadhan.
