Randomness

Computer scientist Lance Fortnow writes that by embracing the computations that surround us, we can begin to understand and tame our seemingly random world.

The prolific researcher found deep connections between randomness and computation and spent a career influencing cryptographers, complexity researchers and more.

Russell Impagliazzo studies hard problems, the limits of cryptography, the nature of randomness and more.

How hard is it to prove that problems are hard to solve? Meta-complexity theorists have been asking questions like this for decades. A string of recent results has started to deliver answers.

Unpredictability can help computer scientists solve otherwise intractable problems.

What makes a proof stronger than a guess? What does evidence look like in the realm of mathematical abstraction? Hear the mathematician Melanie Matchett Wood explain how probability helps to guide number theorists toward certainty.

Daniel Spielman solves important problems by thinking hard — about other questions.

Using ideas borrowed from graph theory, two mathematicians have shown that extremely complex surfaces are easy to traverse.

The existence of secure cryptography depends on one of the oldest questions in computational complexity.