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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

Do you feel nervous when you make a credit-card transaction using your mobile phone? Your worries could soon be a thing of the past, thanks to a low-cost device that could bring powerful cryptography ...

Randomness is a useful resource. Random numbers are a key ingredient in cryptography, statistical analysis, computer simulation, and (more obviously) lotteries and gambling. They could also help make ...

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 ...

In computer security, random numbers are crucial values that must be unpredictable—such as secret keys or initialization vectors (IVs)—forming the foundation of security systems. To achieve this, ...

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 ...