The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In the movie Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr challenges the physicist early in his career: Bohr: Algebra is like sheet music. The important ...

Tiny particles like pollen grains move constantly, pushed and pulled by environmental forces. To study this motion, physicists use a "random walk" model—a system in which every step is determined by a ...

Random processes take place all around us. It rains one day but not the next; stocks and bonds gain and lose value; traffic jams coalesce and disappear. Because they’re governed by numerous factors ...

Here’s a game Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory, invented in 1948. He was trying to model the English language as a random process. Go to your bookshelf, pick up a random book, open it ...