ROBERT R. COVEYOU

This quotation is important because it illustrates a common problem politicians have with funding science and mathematical research. Actually, so far many millions of dollars have gone into studying and developing methods of producing random numbers and sequences of them which are extremely important to many branches of science and essential to the operation of computers. Yet to the layman, the expense of public money to find better ways to pick random numbers seems totally absurd. Just pick one or use any random number. However, it is virtually impossible for a human being to truly randomly pick a number from 1-999. Most methods produce biases which invalidate the randomness. But this is very counter intuitive. So much decision making about scientific funding and policy is counter intuitive to the politician and the general public.

This quotation is important because it illustrates a common problem politicians have with funding science and mathematical research. Actually, so far many millions of dollars have gone into studying and developing methods of producing random numbers and sequences of them which are extremely important to many branches of science and essential to the operation of computers. Yet to the layman, the expense of public money to find better ways to pick random numbers seems totally absurd. Just pick one or use any random number. However, it is virtually impossible for a human being to truly randomly pick a number from 1-999. Most methods produce biases which invalidate the randomness. But this is very counter intuitive. So much decision making about scientific funding and policy is counter intuitive to the politician and the general public.