The law of large numbers describes how the results of an experiment will get closer to the expected value if a person repeats it a significant number of times and calculates an average. It bears some ...

Imagine a horizontal line. The very left is marked one thousand and the very right is marked one billion. On this line, where would you add a marker to represent one million? If you said somewhere in ...

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their ...

More than 150 years ago, the economist and philosopher William Stanley Jevons discovered something curious about the number 4. While musing about how the mind conceives of numbers, he tossed a handful ...

Seven minutes is all it took for a cyber attack to cripple thousands of companies in 2017. That’s according to a new Symantec marketing campaign which references the NotPetya malware attack that ...

Since mid-June 2024, at the end of the company's last major price spike, the company has returned less than 4%. The S&P 500 (SP500, VOO) has returned roughly 9%. That's less than half of the ...

When you move beyond trillions, there are some extremely mind-bending numbers, says Richard Fisher. Some of them are too large to fit in the mind – or even within the known Universe. What's the ...

Peter Shor didn’t set out to break the internet. But an algorithm he developed in the mid-1990s threatened to do just that. In a landmark paper, Shor showed how a hypothetical computer that exploited ...