Memorylessness

In probability and statistics, memorylessness is a property of certain probability distributions: the exponential distributions of non-negative real numbers and the geometric distributions of non-negative integers.

The property is most easily explained in terms of "waiting times." Suppose that a random variable, X, is defined to be the time elapsed in a shop from 9 am on a certain day until the arrival of the first customer: thus X is the time a server waits for the first customer. The "memoryless" property makes a comparison between the probability distributions of the time a server has to wait from 9 am onwards for his first customer, and the time that the server still has to wait for the first customer on those occasions when no customer has arrived by any given later time: the property of memorylessness is that these distributions of "time from now to the next customer" are exactly the same.