Math 361 Links

Probability websites

Probability by Surprise: Class notes for a probability class at Stanford, and some very nice java applets.
Chance Website: A large, comprehensive website, with an extensive collection of online resources and tools for teaching probability and statistics.
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.
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.
Links collection from the Chance web site: A very large collection of links.
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!)

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.

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.)