The first time you hear about the JL lemma, it will seem too good to be true. And it is, kind of, I'll explain. The idea is: if you have points in large d-dimensional space, a RANDOM projection to much smaller k-dim subspace will be "nearly optimal" "in the general case." Or, more specifically: with high probability, the pairwise distances between points are preserved, given a couple other requirements around d and k. So why don't we just use random projections instead of carefully-constructed ones all the time? This is the most common misunderstanding of the JL lemma, and the one thing to really understand about it: in many (most?) datasets that are meaningful to humans, you actually CAN do better with something like maybe PCA. If your dataset is pathological, e.g., the points all lie on a plane even though it's technically in 3 dimensions, then clearly some planes you project onto will be better than others. The JL lemma does not apply to 2 and 3 dimensions, but you can imagine this would be true in large numbers of dimensions too. (See screenshot 1, i hope you like it because i made it myself lol.) If you know just those facts, you will be pretty well-prepared to answer most questions about its use. Most of the papers Delip mentions do presuppose that you know this. At least when I was a student, I found this to be non-obvious.