Testimonials

I wanted to both thank you for your random number generator and apologize for hogging the numbers today (I used up my quota and then went to my coworker's computer to get more numbers). I had to generate 50,000 random numbers for a project at work with only a couple hours' notice—we’re producing cards for a client as part of an instant win game, and each one needs a unique code—and your generator saved the day.

Plus, my coworkers already think I have mystical intellectual powers, and when I can come up with a solution like this in 15 minutes, it boggles their minds.

By the way, I love the user interface and the design of your site—it's simple and easy to use for non-mathematicians, and it has a nice clean, elegant feel to it.

Thanks again!

—Stephanie Dorenbosch, UCG Marketing

I study the life-cycle of viruses, and I perform lots of tissue culture experiments. In order to try to develop theories to explain some results I was getting, I wrote a computer program that uses a Monte Carlo scheme to simulate infection of cells by viruses. I need a different random number for each simulated virus, in order to randomly assign it to a cell that it ‘infects.’ In order for the results to be meaningful, I need to simulate tens of thousands of ‘cells’ and hundreds of thousands of ‘viruses,’ so I need hundreds of thousands of random numbers. The pseudo-random numbers produced by the Apple Macintosh built-in linear congruental generator proved themselves to be not good enough for the job, as I found that some numbers were chosen too often, a definite no-no for my purposes. Then I saw the NY Times article about this site and gave it a try. First I tried using Random.org numbers to seed the Macintosh generator at frequent intervals during the execution of the simulation, but it did not solve the problem. So I tested using all numbers from this site and they passed my quality test. So now I download several batches at a time of 10,000 numbers between 1 and 40,000 and string them into big files as the sources of my numbers. I'd like to be able to download them in even bigger batches, though. Thanks for a truly useful service!

—David N. Levy, University of Alabama at Birmingham