#certified-randomness
#certified-randomness

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Find pi today just by flipping coins

Sometimes the reason pi shows up in randomly generated values is obvious—if there are circles or angles involved, pi is your guy. But sometimes the circle is cleverly hidden, and sometimes the reason pi pops up is a mathematical mystery!

Science

OMG science

fromWIRED

3 weeks ago

You Can Approximate Pi by Dropping Needles on the Floor

Pi appears unexpectedly across mathematics and physics, and can be approximated through geometric probability experiments like Buffon's needle problem from 1777.

Miscellaneous

fromBitcoin Magazine

1 month ago

The Core Issue: Libsecp256k1, Bitcoin's Cryptographic Heart

Libsecp256k1 evolved from a hobby project into essential consensus-critical software protecting Bitcoin's multi-trillion dollar network through secure elliptic curve cryptography implementation.

Information security

fromwww.scientificamerican.com

1 month ago

How do you prove you know a secret without spilling the beans?

Zero-knowledge proofs can convince others without revealing secrets, and showing a simulator's potential existence can suffice to establish zero-knowledge in some cases.

fromwww.scientificamerican.com

2 months ago

How math can reveal lottery fraud

On October 1, 2022, something strange happened in the Philippines: 433 people won the jackpot in the local lottery. For this particular lotto, six numbers ranging in value from 1 to 55 were randomly selected, and the 433 winners all matched. Even more bizarre, when arranged in ascending order, the winning numbers were: 9, 18, 27, 36, 45 and 54. In other words, the winning numbers were multiples of 9 (9 1, 9 2, 9 3, etcetera).