It’s a staple of popular fiction, but two mathematicians in Australia now say that an age-old maxim is nothing more than bananas.

The Infinite Monkey Theorem hypothesizes that, given a typewriter and an infinite amount of time, a monkey could in theory produce the full works of William Shakespeare. It has long been used to illustrate the idea of random chance, and featured in everything from ‘The Simpsons” to “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” 

Now, two academics at the University of…