Mathematicians have spoken: Monkeys will never be able to write Shakespeare

Chances of a 200,000-strong population of monkeys typing until the heat death of the universe creating works of Shakespeare are vanishingly small - (Getty/iStock)

As the old adage goes, a monkey left with a typewriter for an infinite amount of time would eventually write the complete works of William Shakespeare purely by chance.

The so-called Infinite Monkeys Theorem has long been used to demonstrate the principles of probability and randomness, having been widely referenced in pop culture from The Simpsons to A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and believed by some to owe its conceptual origins to Aristotle.