Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Probability can explain why a coin flip has a 50/50 chance of landing heads versus tails, but it also can be used for more ...

The World Science Festival’s panel on Probability and Risk started out in an unusual manner: MIT’s Josh Tenenbaum strode onto a stage and flipped a coin five times, claiming he was psychically ...

Here’s a deceptively simple exercise: Come up with a random phone number. Seven digits in a sequence, chosen so that every digit is equally likely, and so that your choice of one digit doesn’t affect ...

Algorithmic randomness and computability theory inhabit a crossroads between mathematics and computer science, providing a rigorous framework for understanding randomness in infinite sequences and ...

The outrage of the moment in my social media circles is over the New York Times hiring Bret Stephens as an opinion columnist, who promptly devoted his first regular column to sowing doubt about ...

Humans are not terribly good at accurately assessing probability and dealing with randomness. This may stem from these skills having little evolutionary value. We exhibit hindsight and confirmation ...

It’s great to see the enthusiastic reader response to our first Insights puzzle. The puzzle has a deeply counterintuitive solution and raises philosophical questions about randomness and information.

Probability underpins AI, cryptography and statistics. However, as the philosopher Bertrand Russell said, “Probability is the most important concept in modern science, especially as nobody has the ...