无限猴子定理的表述如下：让一只猴子在打字机上随机地按键，当按键时间达到无穷时，几乎必然能够打出任何给定的文本，比如莎士比亚的全套著作。

在这里，几乎必然是一个有特定含义的数学术语，“猴子”也不是一只真正意义上的猴子，它被用来比喻成一个可以产生无限随机字母串行的抽象设备。这个理论说明把一个很大但有限的数看成无限的推论是错误的。猴子精确地通过键盘敲打出一部完整的作品比如说莎士比亚的哈姆雷特，在宇宙的生命周期中发生的概率也是极其低的，但并不是零。

这个理论的变化形式包括多个甚至无限多个打字员，以及目标文本从一个完整的图书馆到一个简单的句子。这些表述可以追述到亚里士多德的《论产生和毁灭》和西塞罗的的《论神之本性》，经过布莱兹·帕斯卡和乔纳森·斯威夫特，最后到现在的形象的打字员的表述形式。在20世纪早期，埃米尔·博雷尔和亚瑟·爱丁顿运用这个理论在统计力学基础中阐述隐式时间标尺。

The 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 the complete works of William Shakespeare.

In this context, "almost surely" is a mathematical term with a precise meaning, and the "monkey" is not an actual monkey, but a metaphor for an abstract device that produces an endless random sequence of letters and symbols. One of the earliest instances of the use of the "monkey metaphor" is that of French mathematician Émile Borel in 1913, but the first instance may be even earlier. The relevance of the theorem is questionable—the probability of a universe full of monkeys typing a complete work such as Shakespeare's Hamlet is so tiny that the chance of it occurring during a period of time hundreds of thousands of orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe is extremely low (but technically not zero).