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 ...

You sit back, hit spin, and watch the reels roll. There’s excitement, suspense, maybe even a little superstition. But behind every spin in real cash slots, there’s cold, hard math. Behind the curtain ...

Rocky Point High School math teacher Jay Rand likes to challenge his students with a classic head-scratcher on the first day ...

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 ...