In 1955, the RAND Corporation published a book called “A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates.” This is exactly what it sounds like. One million random digits, printed in a book, for people who needed them. Before hardware random number generators existed, if your statistical work required true randomness, you either generated it yourself or you looked it up. RAND did the work so you didn’t have to. The book is still for sale on Amazon, and it has over 600 reviews.
One reviewer spotted what they believed was a non-random digit on page 48 and wanted to know who to contact about the correction. Another praised the book warmly but felt the digits really should have been sorted to make them easier to find. A third offered tasting notes on the prose style of the number sequences themselves.
And then there’s the statistics student who used the book to select random phone numbers for a class project on household cleansers in the greater Siouxland area. One of those numbers was answered by the woman who became his wife. They had been happily married for ten years at the time of writing. He thanks RAND.
Whether that last one is a joke is left as an exercise for the reader. Go see for yourself. Have a good weekend.
