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 ...

"No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word," wrote Nassim Nicholas TalebIs the business world inherently chaotic, or is ...

Electricity, water, gas – these are just some of the public utilities we use every day, whether for cooking food in the morning, heating homes throughout the day, or charging computers at night. But ...

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 ...

Researchers identified a problem that holds the key to whether all encryption can be broken -- as well as a surprising connection to a mathematical concept that aims to define and measure randomness.

We all know what “fragile” means. But what is the opposite of fragile? If you are like me, your instinctive response would be “robust” or perhaps “durable.” But you would be wrong. Something that is ...

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 ...