Happy Odd Day! [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue on May 7, 2009 - 42 comments

On May 13, security advisories published by Debian and Ubuntu revealed that, for over a year, their OpenSSL libraries have had a major flaw in their CSPRNG, which is used by key generation functions in many widely-used applications, which caused the "random" numbers produced to be extremely predictable. [lolcat summary] [more inside]
posted by finite on May 16, 2008 - 81 comments

The Prime Game is not really much of a game, but it is a neat & little-known fact about the decimal representation of prime numbers.
posted by Wolfdog on Jul 10, 2007 - 24 comments

Mysterious number 6174. An excellent recreational math article.
posted by fatllama on Jan 13, 2007 - 34 comments

Significance of numbers. Not to be confused with the concept of "significant figures," this page lists the significance of numbers 0 through 1000. See! "2 is the only even prime." Hear! "24 is the largest number divisible by all numbers less than its square root." Thrill! "3367 is the smallest number which can be written as the difference of 2 cubes in 3 ways." Whoa!
posted by scarabic on Nov 11, 2005 - 43 comments

Number Spirals: Coincidences of order. "In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them."
posted by jjray on Apr 15, 2004 - 16 comments

This post is about nothing. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
posted by moonbird on Sep 29, 2003 - 36 comments

LavaRand ...harnessing the power of Lava Lite® lamps to generate truly random numbers....

That's a bold statement, but who am I to doubt the power of the lava lamp. The mathematical purist may disagree with the "truely random" part, but this geek speak convinced me that LavaRand can handle all my random number needs.
posted by bicyclingfool on Apr 30, 2001 - 1 comment

Mathematician Bums Out Entire Scientific Community His "Omega" number--infinite and incalculable--guts hopes for pure mathematics, physicists' hopes for a Theory of Everything, and is just in general kind of bafflingly cool. Builds on the whole Godel/Turing foundation of hopelessness!
posted by Skot on Mar 15, 2001 - 35 comments