NYU Probability Summer 2009

Home Page of The Probability Web. A Web 1.0 version of our Diigo group with some great resources.

A collection of notable quotes regarding probability.

This is for those who wondered what a degree in math can get!

The rising stature of statisticians, who can earn $125,000 at top companies in their first year after getting a doctorate, is a byproduct of the recent explosion of digital data. In field after field, computing and the Web are creating new realms of data to explore - sensor signals, surveillance tapes, social network chatter, public records and more. And the digital data surge only promises to accelerate, rising fivefold by 2012, according to a projection by IDC, a research firm.

Visual proofs of some series. Not 100% related to probability but neat nonetheless. For example, check out the illustration of 1 + 2 + 3 + ... + n = n * (n+1) / 2

An interactive walk-through of the Monty Hall Game and explanation. Try it out!

Not so much relevant to probability but a nice story and it mentions an NYU professor.

Evidence of a surprising mathematical pattern (Zipf Distribution) in both the relative populations of cities and the calories burned by mice.

That's very cool. I hadn't known anything about the Zipf Distribution before.

Whoa. I guess humans are more in tune with their surroundings than we think.

Bayes' Theorem illustrated.

Nice pictures there.

A 1-minute long lecture from the tv show Numb3rs about the famous Monty Hall problem.

I blogged about Numb3rs a few years back: http://www.math.harvard.edu/~leingang/index.php/is-numb3rs-for-real.html

Mandlebrot argues that markets do not follow a normal distribution. An interesting book from the man behind the Mandlebrot set.

thanks for this. Dr. Mandlebrot seems to be always ahead of his time.

Normal distributions for people with a flair for linear algebra :).

I have no Erdos number as I have not published any joint papers. Also, I'm offended with the slander against Kevin Bacon as a "not too well known American actor." Have you ever heard of Footloose?

I like the math joke at the beginning.

When baseball dubbed shortstop Harold Reese "Pee Wee" and first basemen Fred Merkle "Bonehead," they probably weren't trying to lengthen the players' lives. But according to researchers at Wayne State University, major-league players who have nicknames live 2½ years longer, on average, than those without them. The nickname findings are part of the wide-ranging and often arcane academic research that deals with the national pastime. In another study, we learn that players whose first or last name begins with "K" strike out more than those without "K" initials. And in case you were wondering, research finds Democrats support the designated-hitter rule more than Republicans.

the initial K effect really gets me, probably because the human tendency to try and explain it does not work. The original paper is here and contains an additional study which found that "students whose names began with 'C' or 'D' earned lower GPAs than students whose names began with 'A' or 'B.'" http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=946249 Here is some criticism of the study. http://sabermetricresearch.blogspot.com/2007/11/k-study-for-real_26.html http://skepstat.blogspot.com/2007/12/why-i-am-javascript-master.html

wow, the results of the simulation are so clean and well presented. very neat.