A random number book is a book whose main content is a large number of random numbers or random digits. Such books were used in early cryptography and experimental design, and were published by the Rand Corporation[1] and others. The Rand corporation book A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates was first published in 1955 and was reissued in 2001.
Random number books have been rendered obsolete for most purposes by the ready availability of random number generators running on electronic computers. However they still have niche uses, particularly in the performance of experimental music pieces that call for them, such as Vision (1959) and Poem (1960) by La Monte Young.[2]
See also
One-time pad
Random number table
References
http://j-walkblog.com/index.php?/weblog/posts/random_number_book/ retrieved 8 April 2012
http://www.users.waitrose.com/~chobbs/smithyoung.html retrieved 29 August 2012
Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics
Graduate Studies in Mathematics
Hellenica World - Scientific Library
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/"
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
