For those who don’t know about Douglas Adams – he is the author of a trilogy of 6 books which comprise ‘The Ultimate Hitchhikers Guide’. He has a wicked sense of humor and that style is clearly visible in his writings.
In the first book ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ there was a mention to Hamlet and infinite monkeys. The exact sentence was this:
“Ford!” he said, “there’s an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they’ve worked out.”
I was very intrigued at reading this sentence. Why would you talk about monkeys and Hamlet in your book. Hamlet we all know is a tragic play written by Shakespeare. Considering that all Adams’ books are filled with humor, I couldn’t understand the co-relation. And monkeys writing the script of Hamlet… where did that come from? This question kept bothering me for a long time even after I read the 3rd book of the series.
So I started the quest of finding the answer to this question. I started to look for co-relations of Douglas Adams and Hamlet and it turned out that I was on the wrong track. All the time I was focusing on Adams and Hamlet but monkeys were playing an important part. And even more important was the word ‘infinite‘.
The relation was not between Adams and Hamlet, its between Hamlet and the monkey and not just one monkey but an infinite number of monkeys.
Now infinite or let me rephrase it as infinity is an important concept in the field of mathematics. Talk about Calculus, real numbers, set theory, probability – a lot of mathematical concepts have use of the number infinity (technically its not a defined number).
Why am I mentioning Mathematics while referring to Douglas Adams, Hamlet and then monkeys. Its because there is a mathematical theorem named ‘Infinite Monkey Theorem‘. Have you ever heard of it? I didn’t before today.
As per wikipedia, ‘Infinite Monkey Theorem‘ states that
‘A monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as completely works of William Shakespeare‘
Do you see the co-relation now? The statement in the book is a direct derivation of the ‘infinite monkey theorem‘.
I have my own doubts about the viability of this theorem but considering probability is not my favorite topic I would end this quest being impressed by the intelligence of Douglas Adams who firstly has knowledge about such a theorem and then humorously mentions it in his book.
By the way, whoever thought of the the theorem was a nutcase for sure. I mean monkeys typing out Shakespeare’s work, who thinks of that stuff.
Doctor Who and John F. Kennedy are two topics that interest me a lot and when there is a book that brings together both of them, that will definitely spur up my interest. I am not really sure who wrote this book since at some places I found that its written by both David Bishop and James Stevens while at some places I found that its written by just David Bishop. Its not really important but it is still good to know the truth 
