5 Books 10 Quotes V: Randomness IV

Ivars Peterson, "The Jungles of Randomness: A Mathematical Safari", 1998
	"Often, we use the word random loosely to describe something that is disordered, irregular, patternless, or unpredictable. We link it with chance, probability, luck, and coincidence. However, when we examine what we mean by random in various contexts, ambiguities and uncertainties inevitably arise. Tackling the subtleties of randomness allows us to go to the root of what we can understand of the universe we inhabit and helps us to define the limits of what we can know with certainty."
"We use mathematics and statistics to describe the diverse realms of randomness. From these descriptions, we attempt to glean insights into the workings of chance and to search for hidden causes. With such tools in hand, we seek patterns and relationships and propose predictions that help us make sense of the world."
Leonard Mlodinow, "The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives", 2008
	"The theory of randomness is fundamentally a codification of common sense. But it is also a field of subtlety, a field in which great experts have been famously wrong and expert gamblers infamously correct. What it takes to understand randomness and overcome our misconceptions is both experience and a lot of careful thinking."
"Why is the human need to be in control relevant to a discussion of random patterns? Because if events are random, we are not in control, and if we are in control of events, they are not random. There is therefore a fundamental clash between our need to feel we are in control and our ability to recognize randomness. That clash is one of the principal reasons we misinterpret random events."
Deborah J Bennett, "Randomness", 1998
	"Is a random outcome completely determined, and random only by virtue of our ignorance of the most minute contributing factors? Or are the contributing factors unknowable, and therefore render as random an outcome that can never be determined? Are seemingly random events merely the result of fluctuations superimposed on a determinate system, masking its predictability, or is there some disorderliness built into the system itself?"
"Can randomness result from nonrandom situations? Is randomness merely the human inability to recognize a pattern that may in fact exist? Or is randomness a function of our inability, at any point, to predict the result?” (Deborah J. Bennett, "Randomness", 1998)
William Byers, "How Mathematicians Think", 2007
	"What is randomness? At the level of our everyday life experience we call it ‘chance’, something with which that we all feel familiar. It refers to something unexpected, something caused by luck or fortune, that is, without any apparent cause. Randomness is, in a sense, the opposite of determinism. It reflects the ordinary sense that some things are too complicated to admit of a simple explanation or even any explanation at all."
"[…] it would seem that randomness and order are both inevitable parts of any description of reality. When we try to understand some particular phenomenon we are, in effect, banishing disorder. Before a piece of mathematics is understood it stands as a random collection of data. After it is understood, it is ordered, manageable. […] Both properties - the randomness and the order - are present simultaneously. This is what should be called complexity. Complexity is ordered randomness."
Edward Beltrami, "Chaos and Order in Mathematics and Life", 1999
	"Randomness is the very stuff of life, looming large in our everyday experience. […] The fascination of randomness is that it is pervasive, providing the surprising coincidences, bizarre luck, and unexpected twists that color our perception of everyday events."
"The subject of probability begins by assuming that some mechanism of uncertainty is at work giving rise to what is called randomness, but it is not necessary to distinguish between chance that occurs because of some hidden order that may exist and chance that is the result of blind lawlessness. This mechanism, figuratively speaking, churns out a succession of events, each individually unpredictable, or it conspires to produce an unforeseeable outcome each time a large ensemble of possibilities is sampled." Previous Post <<||>> Next Post