Description
Book SynopsisWhat 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. This title 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.
Trade Review"Nahin's sophisticated puzzles, and their accompanying explanations, have a far better than even chance of fascinating and preoccupying the mathematically literate readership they seek."--Publisher's Weekly "An entertaining, thought-provoking collection of twenty-one puzzles...These puzzles invite the reader to think intuitively, mathematically, and creatively about the laws of probability as they apply in lighthearted, often counterintuitive ways to a diverse collection of practical and speculative situations."--Mathematics Teacher "By following Nahin's informal style it is possible to set [the examples] up quickly from first principles and slip them into courses on calculus, algebra, or scientific programming. They also offer a wealth of topics for undergraduate projects. Those duelling idiots are fighting over a goldmine."--Des Higham, MSOR Connections
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Preface xi Introduction 3 The Problems 15 1. How to ask an Embarrassing question 15 2. When Idiots duel 16 3. Will the light Bulb glow? 22 4. Tho Underdog and the World Series 26 5. The Curious Case of the Snowy Birthdays 27 6. When Human Flesh Begins to Fail 34 7. Baseball Again, and Mortal Flesh Too 51 8. Ball Madness 56 9. Who Pays for the Coffee? 42 10. The Chess Champ versus the Gunslinger 45 11. A Different Slice of Probabilistic Pi 49 12. When Negativity is a No-No 50 15. The Power of Randomness 51 14. The Random Radio 52 15. An Inconceivable Difficulty 55 16. The Unsinkable Tub is Sinking! How to Find Her, Fast 57 17. A Walk in the Garden 58 18. Two Flies Stuck on a Piece of Flypaper--How Far Apart? 61 19.The Blind Spider and the Fly 62 20. Reliably Unreliable 68 21. When Theory Fails, There is always the Computer 71 The Solutions 81 Random Number Generators 176 "Some things Just Have to be Done By Hand!" 198 MATLAB Programs 202 Index 267 About the Author 271
