The Strange Math That Predicts (Almost) Anything

How many times do you need to shuffle a deck of cards to make them truly random? How much uranium does it take to build a nuclear bomb? How can you predict the next word in a sentence? And how does Google know which page you're actually searching for?

Well, the reason we know the answer to all of these questions is because of a strange math feud in Russia that took place over a hundred years ago. In 1905, socialist groups all across Russia rose up against Thesar, the ruler of the empire. They demanded a complete political reform or failing that that he step down from power entirely. This divided the nation into two.

So on one side you got the Tsarists, right? They wanted to defend the status quo and keep the tsar in power. But then on the other side you had the socialists who wanted this complete political reform. And this division was so bad that it crept into every part of society to the point where even mathematicians started picking sides.

On the side of the zar was Pavl Necrosov unofficially called the zsar of probability. Necrasov was a deeply religious and powerful man and he used his status to argue that math could be used to explain free will and the will of God. His intellectual nemesis on the socialist side was Andre Marov, also known as Andre the Furious. Marov was an atheist and he had no patience for people who were being unrigorous, something he considered Necrosoft to be because in his eyes, math had nothing to do with free will or religion.

So he publicly criticized Necrosoft's work, listing it among the abuses of mathematics. Their feud centered on the main idea people had used to do probability for the last 200 years. And we can illustrate this with a simple coin flip. When I flip the coin 10 times, I get six times heads and four times tails, which is obviously not the 50/50 you'd expect.

But if I keep flipping the coin, then at first the ratio jumps all over the place. But after a large number of flips, we see that it slowly settles down and approaches 50/50. And in this case, after 100 flips, we end up on 51 heads and 49 tails, which is almost exactly what you would expect. This behavior that the average ...