A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates
Rating: 6 out of 7.
If there is one single book that a true geek's bookshelf must not be missing, then it's this one. I've only recently heard of this book, and actually this book was the book that made me starting to write book reviews.
The books sole content is a table of one million random numbers of high quality plus a table of a hundret thousand normal deviates.
This may sound funny to you, and of course it is funny, yet it's not a joke. If hackers laugh about this book, it's that kind of ↗hacker humor also known as ↗ha ha only serious.
The truth is, mathematically there are random numbers of lower and random numbers of higher quality. The more random the numbers are, the higher their quality. They should be like white noise. For certain mathematical problems, especially in the fields of statistics and stochastics, the quality of random numbers really matters.
So who'd be using this book these days? There are two groups of people that need it. One group is mathematicians that need a good random table that yet is reproducible. The random number sequences in this book are of high quality. But in case mathematicians or computer scientists observe interesting behaviour of formulae or algorithms with certain number sequences, these sequences can easily be referred to by their page, line, column and length in the book. The second group is geeks like me that simply look for the most geekish book to put in their bookshelf.
The rating 6 out of 7 is based on the fact that I haven't tested the quality of the random number sequences myself. It's only the fact that they made it into a book plus the preface that makes me assume their high quality. I wouldn't want to rate something too high by mistake or lack of knowledge.
As an interesting side note, I may state that this kind of random numbers actually are a reductio ad absurdum somehow, or an oxymoron. If these random numbers are of high quality, which means their mathematical and scientifical quality of randomness actually is really high, they only look like random numbers and behave like random numbers but aren't really random but well chosen to actually meet these scientifical requirements :)
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