Say you’re at a party with nine other people and everyone shakes everyone else’s hand exactly once. How many handshakes take place? This is the “handshake problem,” and it’s one of my favorites. As a ...

We study the large exceedance probabilities and large exceedance paths of the recursive sequence Vn = Mn Vn−1 + Qn, where {(Mn, Qn)} is an i.i.d. sequence, and M1 is a d × d random matrix and Q1 is a ...

A multi-institutional research team found the cognitive ability to represent recursive sequences occurs in humans and non-human primates across age, education, culture and species. Recursion -- the ...