Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss random and pseudorandom numbers. Randomness will be familiar to anybody who’s bought a lottery ticket or shuffled a pack of cards. But there’s also a phenomenon known as pseudo-randomness –numbers which look random but aren’t. So why are these numbers useful and how can they be generated? Melvyn is joined by Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford; Colva Roney-Dougal, Senior Lecturer in Pure Mathematics at the University of St Andrews; and Timothy Gowers, Royal Society Research Professor in Mathematics at the University of Cambridge.
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Tagged with “chance”
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In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg: Random and Pseudorandom
Tagged with bbc in our time science mathematics randomness chance numbers
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The Digital Human: Chance
Aleks Krotoski explores whether the web is killing serendipity? Is it reducing our opportunity for chance encounters? Or is it possible to engineer these ‘happy accidents’ in the digital world ?
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Leonard Mlodinow on randomness and his book The Drunkard’s Walk
Leonard Mlodinow, of the California Institute of Technology is the author of The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. His lecture on the subject of randomness was presented by the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario on May 6th, 2009.