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The Pleasures of Probability

Richard Isaac (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

244 Seiten

1995
Springer-Verlag New York Inc.
978-0-387-94415-9 (ISBN)

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The ideas of probability are all around us. Lotteries, casino gambling, the al most non-stop polling which seems to mold public policy more and more these are a few of the areas where principles of probability impinge in a direct way on the lives and fortunes of the general public. At a more re moved level there is modern science which uses probability and its offshoots like statistics and the theory of random processes to build mathematical descriptions of the real world. In fact, twentieth-century physics, in embrac ing quantum mechanics, has a world view that is at its core probabilistic in nature, contrary to the deterministic one of classical physics. In addition to all this muscular evidence of the importance of probability ideas it should also be said that probability can be lots of fun. It is a subject where you can start thinking about amusing, interesting, and often difficult problems with very little mathematical background. In this book, I wanted to introduce a reader with at least a fairly decent mathematical background in elementary algebra to this world of probabil ity, to the way of thinking typical of probability, and the kinds of problems to which probability can be applied. I have used examples from a wide variety of fields to motivate the discussion of concepts.

1: Cars, Goats, and Sample Spaces. 2: How to Count: Birthdays and
Lotteries. 3: Conditional Probability: From Kings to Prisoners. 4: The
Formula of Thomas Bayes and Other Matters. 5: The Idea of
Independence, with Applications. 6: A Little Bit About Games. 7:
Random Variables, Expectations, and More About Games. 8: Baseball
Cards, The Law of Large Numbers, and Bad News for Gamblers. 9: From
Traffic to Chocolate Chip Cookies with the Poisson Distribution. 10:
The Desperate Case of the Gambler's Ruin. 11: Breaking Sticks, Tossing
Needles, and More: Probability on Continuous Sample Spaces. 12: Normal
Distribution, and Order from Diversity via the Central Limit Theorem.
13: Random Numbers: What They Are and How to Use Them. 14: Computers
and Probability. 15: Statistics: Applying Probability to Make
Decisions. 16: Roaming the Number Line with a Markov Chain:
Dependence. 17: The Brownian Motion, and Other Processes in Continuous
Time.

Reihe/Serie	Readings in Mathematics
Reihe/Serie	Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics
Zusatzinfo	XV, 244 p.
Verlagsort	New York, NY
Sprache	englisch
Maße	155 x 235 mm
Themenwelt	Mathematik / Informatik ► Mathematik ► Wahrscheinlichkeit / Kombinatorik
ISBN-10	0-387-94415-X / 038794415X
ISBN-13	978-0-387-94415-9 / 9780387944159
Zustand	Neuware