Randomness

Shayan Oveis Gharan has won the Abacus Medal for using tools from across mathematics to boost the power of algorithms.

Before he won a Fields Medal for his pioneering work balancing randomness and order, Yu Deng first had to achieve equilibrium in his own life.

The central limit theorem started as a bar trick for 18th-century gamblers. Now scientists rely on it every day.

The leading approach to the simplex method, a widely used technique for balancing complex logistical constraints, can’t get any better.

An attack on a fundamental proof technique reveals a glaring security issue for blockchains and other digital encryption schemes.

After just a few months of work, a complete newcomer to the world of sphere packing has solved one of its biggest open problems.

Researchers have devised a scheme for painting the edges of a graph that’s almost as speedy as possible.

When pigeons outnumber pigeonholes, some birds must double up. This obvious statement — and its inverse — have deep connections to many areas of math and computer science.

Randomness is essential to some research, but it’s always been prohibitively complicated. Now, we can use “pseudorandomness” instead.