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The Pleasures of Probability

  • Textbook
  • © 1995

Overview

Authors:
  1. Richard Isaac

    1. Department of Mathematics, Lehman College, City University of New York, Bronx, USA
      The Graduate Center, New York, USA

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Part of the book series: Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics (UTM)

Part of the book sub series: Readings in Mathematics (READINMATH)

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Table of contents (17 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xv
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Cars, Goats, and Sample Spaces

    • Richard Isaac
    Pages 1-11

  3. How to Count: Birthdays and Lotteries

    • Richard Isaac
    Pages 13-20

  4. Conditional Probability: From Kings to Prisoners

    • Richard Isaac
    Pages 21-30

  5. The Formula of Thomas Bayes and Other Matters

    • Richard Isaac
    Pages 31-40

  6. The Idea of Independence, with Applications

    • Richard Isaac
    Pages 41-53

  7. A Little Bit About Games

    • Richard Isaac
    Pages 55-59

  8. Random Variables, Expectations, and More About Games

    • Richard Isaac
    Pages 61-76

  9. Baseball Cards, The Law of Large Numbers, and Bad News for Gamblers

    • Richard Isaac
    Pages 77-93

  10. From Traffic to Chocolate Chip Cookies with the Poisson Distribution

    • Richard Isaac
    Pages 95-102

  11. The Desperate Case of the Gambler’s Ruin

    • Richard Isaac
    Pages 103-110

  12. Breaking Sticks, Tossing Needles, and More: Probability on Continuous Sample Spaces

    • Richard Isaac
    Pages 111-125

  13. Normal Distributions, and Order from Diversity via the Central Limit Theorem

    • Richard Isaac
    Pages 127-139

  14. Random Numbers:What They Are and How to Use Them

    • Richard Isaac
    Pages 141-155

  15. Computers and Probability

    • Richard Isaac
    Pages 157-168

  16. Statistics: Applying Probability to Make Decisions

    • Richard Isaac
    Pages 169-186

  17. Roaming the Number Line With a Markov Chain: Dependence

    • Richard Isaac
    Pages 187-202

  18. The Brownian Motion, and Other Processes in Continuous Time

    • Richard Isaac
    Pages 203-214

  19. Back Matter

    Pages 215-244
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Keywords

About this book

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.

Authors and Affiliations

  • Department of Mathematics, Lehman College, City University of New York, Bronx, USA

    Richard Isaac

  • The Graduate Center, New York, USA

    Richard Isaac

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