Math 361 Links
Probability websites
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Probability by Surprise: Class notes for
a probability class at Stanford, and some very nice java applets.
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Chance Website:
A large, comprehensive website, with an extensive collection of
online resources and tools for teaching probability and statistics.
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Chance News: Part of the Chance Project, this site
contains summaries and analyses of news stories that have involve
statistical or probabilistic ideas.
The entire news archive is searchable; for example, a search on
"goats" yields 9 hits (most of which deal with the "car/goats"
problem), and a search on "birthday" yields 53 hits.
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Grinstead/Small, Introduction to Probability:
An introductory probability text which is available for
purchase as a bound hard copy volume, and can be downloaded
(for free) from this site.
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Links collection from the Chance web site:
A very large collection of links.
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Interactive Mathematics Miscellany and Puzzles, Probability:
Gives down-to-earth descriptions of some famous puzzles and paradoxes
in probability theory. (Thanks to Jon Lin for pointing this out!)
Who's who in probability
- Auguste De
Moivre (1667 - 1754), author of "Doctrine of Chances",
and "inventor" of the normal approximation to the binomial
distribution,
- Reverend Thomas
Bayes
(1702 - 1761), of Bayes' rule fame
- Simeon Poisson
(1781 - 1840), after whom the Poisson distribution and
the Poisson approximation were named
- Andrey
Kolmogorov (1903 - 1987), considered
the father of modern probability,
who put probability theory on a
rigorous mathematical footing based on the "Kolmogorov axioms"
- Carl Friedrich Gauss
(1777 - 1855), after whom the "Gaussian", or "normal",
distribution is named. Gauss has many other achievements to his
credit, and his stature in mathematics is comparable
to that of Newton or Einstein in physics.
Some quotes
-
This branch of mathematics [Probability] is the only one, I
believe, in which good writers frequently get results which are
entirely erroneous. (Charles Pierce)
-
Pascal's definition of probability:
The excitement that a gambler feels when making a bet is equal to the
amount he might win times the probability of winning it.
(Blaise Pascal)
- Proof according to Gauss:
I mean the word proof not in the sense of lawyers, who set two half
proofs equal to a whole one, but in the sense of a mathematician,
where half proof = 0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt
becomes impossible. (Karl Friedrich Gauss)
- Proof according to Jean Chretien:
A proof is a proof. What kind of a proof? It's a proof. A proof is a proof.
And when you have a good proof, it's because it's proven. (Jean
Chretien, as reported in this story
from CBC.)
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