Abstract of The Drunkard's Walk

"We may imagine Chance and Design to be as it were in Competition with each other for the production of some sort of Events, and may calculate what Probability there is, that those events should be rather owing to one than to the other."

-- French mathematician and pioneer in the study of randomness Abraham de Moivre, 1718

Random processes are fundamental in nature, and in our everyday lives, and an understanding of random processes is important in areas of study ranging from scientific research to finance, and in gaining a true understanding of daily activities such as traffic flow, waiting lines at the doctor's office, and achievements in business and sports. The Drunkard's Walk will describe the laws of randomness and random processes (strings of random events), tell the story of the revolutions in thought that led to those laws, and examine the evolution of intellectual ideas and assumptions about the random.