Group items tagged

NY Times article about bridge and probability

Unfortunately, the rest of the column is full of bridge jargon and I don't play. This is like NASCAR for nerds.

Plus Maths Magazine: Feature Article. A look at what might have happened to a certain large bank -the probabilities of default turned out to be a lot higher than expected!

What's the length of a random chord in a circle? It turns out that even if you try to distribute the chord uniformly there is an ambiguity.

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

There are at least 3 conditional probabilities problems embedded in the article (it doesn't look like there are specific enough numbers to solve them precisely though).

This is really cool. A brief exposure to how computers are able to play chess.

Interesting but a little morbid.

Interesting but a little morbid.

That's creepy.

Although I did not enter the debate, I remember the Marilyn vos Savant vs. the mathematicians episode. I was in high school at the time. Marilyn's solution is sound, and her tactics are indeed wise: to people who disagreed with her explanation, she suggested they simply experiment and see what they find. So both the Bayesian and frequency models of probability are brought into play here. Persi Diaconis, the carnival card shark turned Harvard mathematics professor who I mentioned in class, is also quoted in this article. The Marilyn vs. the Mathematicians rematch did not turn out so well for her. When Wiles and Taylor finally proved Fermat's Last Theorem, she pronounced it phony because she didn't understand it. The mathematical consensus remains that the proof is good.

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

How Bayes's Theorem can be used to decide if mail is spam or not.

Very cool. Now that we see that mail filter software "adapts" to the user, we can address the problem in class of what would happen if a doctor who deals with prostate issues uses a filter and words such as viagra prop up when the email is not actually spam.