Duelling Idiots and Other Probability Puzzlers

Paul J. Nahin

298 pages, parution le 06/12/2002

Ajouter à une liste

Indisponible

Résumé

What are your chances of dying on your next flight, being called for jury duty, or winning the lottery? We all encounter probability problems in our everyday lives. In this collection of twenty-one puzzles, Paul Nahin challenges us to think creatively about the laws of probability as they apply in playful, sometimes deceptive, ways to a fascinating array of speculative situations. Games of Russian roulette, problems involving the accumulation of insects on flypaper, and strategies for determining the odds of the underdog winning the World Series all reveal intriguing dimensions to the workings of probability. Over the years, Nahin, a veteran writer and teacher of the subject, has collected these and other favorite puzzles designed to instruct and entertain math enthusiasts of all backgrounds.

If idiots A and B alternately take aim at each other with a six-shot revolver containing one bullet, what is the probability idiot A will win? What are the chances it will snow on your birthday in any given year? How can researchers use coin flipping and the laws of probability to obtain honest answers to embarrassing survey questions? The solutions are presented here in detail, and many contain a profound element of surprise. And some puzzles are beautiful illustrations of basic mathematical concepts: "The Blind Spider and the Fly," for example, is a clever variation of a "random walk" problem, and "Duelling Idiots" and "The Underdog and the World Series" are straightforward introductions to binomial distributions.

Written in an informal way and containing a plethora of interesting historical material, Duelling Idiots is ideal for those who are fascinated by mathematics and the role it plays in everyday life and in our imaginations.

Contents

The Problems

How to ask an Embarrassing question
When Idiots duel
Will the light Bulb glow?
The Underdog and the World Series
The Curious Case of the Snowy Birthdays
When Human Flesh Begins to Fail
Baseball Again, and Mortal Flesh Too
Ball Madness
Who Pays for the Coffee?
The Chess Champ versus the Gunslinger
A Different Slice of Probabilistic Pi
When Negativity is a No-No
The Power of Randomness
The Random Radio
An Inconceivable Difficulty
The Unsinkable Tub is Sinking! How to Find Her, Fast
A Walk in the Garden
Two Flies Stuck on a Piece of Flypaper--How Far Apart?
The Blind Spider and the Fly
Reliably Unreliable
When Theory Fails, There is always the Computer

The Solutions

L'auteur - Paul J. Nahin

Paul J. Nahin is Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of Duelling Idiots and Other Probability Puzzlers, When Least Is Best: How Mathematicians Discovered Many Clever Ways to Make Things as Small (or as Large) as Possible, and An Imaginary Tale: The Story of I [the square root of -1] (all Princeton).

Caractéristiques techniques

	PAPIER
Éditeur(s)	Princeton University Press
Auteur(s)	Paul J. Nahin
Parution	06/12/2002
Nb. de pages	298
Format	14 x 21,5
Couverture	Broché
Poids	394g
Intérieur	Noir et Blanc
EAN13	9780691102863
ISBN13	978-0-691-10286-3