I want a random number, between 0 and 1 (for the purposes, this is JavaScript, but that shouldn't matter so much). But I don't just want a uniform distribution of numbers, I want something skewed, so ...

The author presents a generalization he worked out in 1950 of von Neumann's method of generating random samples from the exponential distribution by comparisons of uniform random numbers on $(0, 1)$.

RANDOMNESS IS A valuable commodity. Computer models of complex systems ranging from the weather to the stockmarket are voracious consumers of random numbers. Cryptography, too, relies heavily on ...