You sit back, hit spin, and watch the reels roll. There’s excitement, suspense, maybe even a little superstition. But behind every spin in real cash slots, there’s cold, hard math. Behind the ...

Random walk ideas have informed everything from biology to video games. This team identified a key geometry idea that unites some random walks and sets others apart.

For example, if we flip a coin 100 times, we would expect it to come up heads about fifty times. Once we know a probability distribution, “random” does not mean unpredictable at all. I found myself ...