Gresham provides outstanding educational talks and videos for the public free of charge. There are over 2, videos available on the Gresham website. Your support will help us to encourage people's love of learning for many years to come. Randomness is clearly important in computer games and in the Premium Bond prize draw. But it is perhaps surprising that random numbers can also help us find the solution to well-defined business problems. Random numbers can be a valuable problem-solving tool, used to help solve difficult industrial problems and determine the optimal choice of business strategies.
Professor Tony Mann has taught mathematics and computing at the University of Greenwich for over twenty years. He was President of the British Society for Gresham College has offered an outstanding education to the public free of charge for over years. Today, Gresham College plays an important role in fostering a love of learning and a greater understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Your donation will help to widen our reach and to broaden our audience, allowing more people to benefit from a high-quality education from some of the brightest minds.
For the Love of Learning since Gresham provides outstanding educational talks and videos for the public free of charge. Donate Today. Popular topics: History. Might as well toss a coin: How random numbers help us find exact solutions.
Professor Tony Mann. Add to my list. Download Text Word Transcript. As a child I obsessively wrote numbers on slips of paper in order to simulate football scores by drawing lots, making great efforts to distribute the numbers to give the maximum realism in the results I obtained. In my first job, I wrote a random number generator for a minicomputer and spent weeks carrying out statistical tests to verify its randomness. It passed every test I tried except one: sadly that one was essential to the objective of my work.
Randomness came into my first experience of democracy. When I cast my first vote at the age of 18, the candidate I voted for tied with another, and the election was decided by the Returning Officer tossing a coin which came down against my choice. So with this lifelong interest in the mathematics of chance, I am delighted to have the opportunity to talk to you tonight about how randomness helps computers solve all sorts of mathematical problems.
