  We suggest that the extension of the Racah seniority description of strongly
interacting fermions in the nuclear shell model is directly generalizable to
describe pairing of atoms in cold Fermi systems. We illustrate this by the
fermionic pairing in the much studied cold two-component gas of Li atoms. Our
pairing interaction is two orders of magnitude stronger than that used in the
usual BCS approach. We also explain why the Racah scheme is less applicable to
nuclei, and discuss the similarities of the strongly-coupled matter in cold
fermion systems and the new form of matter found in RHIC close to T_c.
