The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In the movie Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr challenges the physicist early in his career: Bohr: Algebra is like sheet music. The important ...

Random number generation is a central process in many applications, including cryptography, security, and scientific simulations. It is the process of generating a series of numbers that cannot be ...

Tiny particles like pollen grains move constantly, pushed and pulled by environmental forces. To study this motion, physicists use a “random walk” model — a system in which every step is determined by ...

Have you ever come across a statement like this: “I can’t believe that something as beautiful and complex as the human eye could be the result of a random process like evolution”? Or this: “It seems ...

The Monte Carlo simulation estimates the probability of different outcomes in a process that cannot easily be predicted because of the potential for random variables.

Here’s a game Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory, invented in 1948. He was trying to model the English language as a random process. Go to your bookshelf, pick up a random book, open it ...

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 ...