Group items tagged

The application used here is del.icio.us and not diigo but the way it's used is exactly the same. So it should help if you're unclear on this concept still.

Quick video overview of social bookmarking with del.icio.us.

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.

using the poisson distribution to approximate the binomial distribution

Unless you're really interested in all the pictures of license plates, scroll down to "County coding" to see the mathematically relevant part. Ask yourself: how many license plates can be generating in the scheme used from 1963 to 2008? How many can be generated in the new scheme?

A gallery of Indiana license plates and description of the various coding schemes used.

Experiment with experimental probability using a fixed size section spinner, a variable section spinner, 2 regular 6-sided number cubes or design your own number cubes. Appropriate for elementary grades..

Describing the way phone numbers is North America are coded

Area codes used to be much more restrictive. How many area codes were possible before 1995? After 1995?

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

I pulled this up from the MIT Open CourseWare page under their Problem Solving class. I think they use problems of this caliber to prepare for the Putnam exam.

OK, I now know two ways to solve this. The first way was along the lines you described in the break to me, Sam. It makes more sense than I originally thought, and with your Discrete Math knowhow you might be able to solve it. There's also a clever way, which I admit I didn't figure out until I solved it the other way.

That's a great list of problems btw!

Far More Than You Ever Wanted To Know about where this formula comes from.

Stirling's approximation is for n! in terms of continuous functions.

The derivation didn't require any complex analysis after all; thank goodness.

A biography about magician-turned-mathematician (probabilist) Persi Diaconis as well as a look at his experiments to understand the bias of a coin flip.

Great article. Everything I've been saying about Diaconis I learned through oral tradition. It's good to know I was pretty much right on.

Funny, after reading the article I concluded that you must've either read this article or a similar biographical sketch. Diaconis must be some legend! One of my favorite parts was that he was a bit 'rough' at one point. Gives the rest of us some hope!

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.

Yikes! A 45% chance of some kind of cancer. Not good news for those of us over 30.

Data on the portion of individuals surviving to various ages broken down by sex, race, and other factors.

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

the data, pure and simple