George Pólya’s random walk theorem absolved him of being a lurker and revealed how the laws of chance interact with physical ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...