• Question: What is a mathematical concept that most people underestimate or overlook?

    Asked by Jack n Quinn to Sarah C, SamG, Samet, josephcameron, johneaston, Heather W, Ebrahim S on 9 Jun 2025.
    • Photo: John Easton

      John Easton answered on 9 Jun 2025:

      Random numbers. When people talk about random numbers, generally they don’t really want something that is truly random. What they want is a nice even distribution of “random” numbers over the range that they need.

      There are plenty of ways of generating truly random numbers, but in practice, people need something more structured (and hence you could argue that it’s not random at all)!!

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