Generating a string of random numbers is easy. The hard part is proving that they’re random. As Dilbert creator Scott Adams once pointed out, “that’s the problem with randomness: you can never be sure ...

Just in time for Friday's $1.35 billion Mega Millions jackpot, I was contacted by something called Lotto N Crowd that says its proprietary algorithm can help customers pick winning numbers. Gracious ...

Any Broadway producer will tell you there’s no magic formula for Broadway success. But that doesn’t stop some people from trying to find one. The result: A multi-variable linear regression model (you ...

Prime numbers are tricky things. We learn in school that they’re numbers with no factors other than 1 and themselves, and that mathematicians have known for thousands of years that an infinite number ...

David Harvey receives funding from the Australian Research Council. Around 1956, the famous Soviet mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov conjectured that this is the best possible way to multiply two ...

ALGORITHMS sound scary, of interest only to dome-headed mathematicians. In fact they have become the instruction manuals for a host of routine consumer transactions. Browse for a book on Amazon.com ...

MIT’s Peter Shor explains why he devised an algorithm for a quantum computer that could unravel our online data encryption Internet security relies on the fact that our computers can’t break its ...