Rabih Alameddine, who won the National Book Award last month, has described his idiosyncratic approach as “childish ...

Ask a designer or artist if any aspect of their process is random. The answer will likely reveal a complex relationship between human cognition, digital media, authorship, and even conceptions of ...

Are you convinced that the shuffle mode on your iPod is messing with your mind? Or that certain numbers are bound to come up in the next lottery? If yes, you may be holding on to some serious ...

Randomness would seem to make a mathematical statement harder to prove. In fact, it often does the opposite. Of all the tools available to the mathematician, randomness would seem to offer little ...

Because of its importance, much scientific effort is devoted to understanding when a given process generates ‘good’ randomness. A process is represented by a device, or black box, producing bits (Fig.

These are not the kinds of objects that concern Scott Sheffield. Sheffield, a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studies shapes that are constructed by random ...

The modern computer age runs on random numbers. Patternless strings of digits are essential for the data encryption that promises privacy and security online. And since computers—fundamentally ...

When Charles Darwin declared that evolutionary variations occur by chance, many of his contemporaries were alarmed, worrying about the implications of chance for people’s belief in the God who ...