In the real world, probability is a tough thing to characterize. If I roll a die, what does it mean to say that it has a one-sixth chance of coming up 5? We say that the outcome is random because we ...

Prime numbers are sometimes called math’s “atoms” because they can be divided by only themselves and 1. For two millennia, mathematicians have wondered if the prime numbers are truly random, or if ...

To simulate chance occurrences, a computer can’t literally toss a coin or roll a die. Instead, it relies on special numerical recipes for generating strings of shuffled digits that pass for random ...

Finding π using random numbers and probability. This short demonstrates a Monte Carlo approach, showing how randomness and statistics can converge to an accurate estimate of pi through repeated trials ...

Over the years, multiple studies have found that Google Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine was returning not-so-random numbers when you called the Math.random() function. Today that’s been fixed, with the ...