A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates by Rand Corporation

In the old computing days, you could order punch cards with these million random numbers. The text parts of the book come as PDF files and you can download the million random numbers as a data file.

If you go to the RAND website about the book, you can actually download the book for free. This book was first published by the RAND Corporation in 1955. Indeed, there is a book that contains nothing but a short introduction and then page after page of random numbers– 1 million of them, in fact! The book is titled “A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates.” Of course, we had to immediately google this book, procrastinating our coding for a few minutes.Ĭover of the book “A Million Random Digits.” Image taken from here. During our discussion about this, one of my classmates said, “Have you ever heard of that book that is nothing but random numbers?” We started wondering about these two questions this evening. For most types of applications in mathematics and science, a pseduorandom number is nearly as good as a random number.īut what if you need actual random numbers?Īnd how did people generate random numbers before computers became fancy enough to generate pseudorandom numbers? These days, many computer programs, such as MATLAB, have pseudorandom number generators built in. Random numbers are very important for many types of statistical analyses and numerical simulations. The “rand” function calls upon a random number between 0 and 1 as a default, though you can tell it to use other ranges.

This function calls upon a computer algorithm that generates random– or really pseudorandom since they’re calculated by a computer– numbers. One of the things we had to do this evening was use the “rand” function in MATLAB. Also, we can eat Chinese food and giggle and have fun as we work. Working in a group is easier as four pairs of eyes tend to catch code errors faster than one pair of eyes. Image taken from .Įarlier this evening I met up with three classmates (all girls, by the way my statistics class is about 90% female) to work on programming our latest statistics homework into MATLAB. First page of random digits in “A Million Random Digits” book.

A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates by Rand Corporation