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 ...

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 ...

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 ...