Think of a random number between one and ten. Most likely, you chose seven—so exactly how random was your choice? Turns out that generating a truly random number is more difficult than you might think ...

There will be an app for that: making random numbers on a mobile phone. (Courtesy: Marketa Michalkova) Do you feel nervous when you make a credit-card transaction using your mobile phone? Your worries ...

You indirectly use random numbers online every day—to establish secure connections, to encrypt data, perhaps even to satisfy your gambling problem. But their ubiquity belies the fact that they’re ...

Randomness sits at the heart of everything we do online. Many encryption algorithms depend upon randomly generated numbers to work, and that’s just one example of many. But how random is random? It’s ...

A team that included researchers at a US bank says it has created a protocol that can generate certified truly random numbers, opening the possibility that current generation quantum computers can be ...

Randomness can be a Good Thing. If your system generates truly random numbers, it can avoid and withstand network packet collisions just one of many applications. Here's what you need to know about ...

We think of random numbers as being somehow arbitrary and unknowable in advance. Mathematically, a given string of numbers is random if there is no shorter way to express the string than the string ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

Your job is to create a random number generator. Your device starts with a speaker and a membrane. On this membrane will sit a handful of small, marble-size copper balls. An audio source feeds the ...