Probability and the Real World

To readers

What aspects of the real world involve chance? What does mathematical probability tell about about those aspects? What concepts from mathematical probability can be illustrated by interesting contemporary real data? This web site records my efforts to articulate some answers to such questions. It is aimed at readers who have either read some "popular science" style account of probability, or taken a college course involving probability. So I won't explain very basic stuff, and I mostly avoid discussing material easily found elsewhere. Similarly non-technical but more statistics-oriented articles can be found on two other web sites: Understanding Uncertainty and Chance News.

Let me emphasize that I am not promoting any grandiose theory. The central content is

a set of about 50 pages on different specific topics (indexed here) not well discussed elsewhere at the same (fairly non-technical) level

and you could now go there and browse those in any order. Another way to get started is to read

this overview of the content.

A central theme is what I poetically call

a map of the world of chance [still under construction]

which is my attempt at explaining the breadth of the subject -- what are all the contexts where we perceive chance?

Also relevant:

Non-technical books on probability: list and brief reviews
A public talk, which changes slightly each time I give it. Most recently (September 2018) it is Probability, outside the textbook. An older version (January 2012) was The top ten things that math probability says about the real world.

To instructors

Complementary to (and in places more mathematical than) these topics pages, there is material from my U.C. Berkeley course which consisted of 20 lectures on different topics. Here is a write-up of some lectures from the 2014 course. For instructors considering teaching some similar course, there is extensive material at the course web site, in particular lecture slides from the (final) course in 2017. Amongst this material is

A March 2012 talk Reflections on devising a "probability in the real world" course.
My eclectic list of 100+ Miscellaneous papers that caught my eye as maybe relevant to the course.
Making students do a pre-quiz like this helps attract the right students.
My suggestions for possible course projects
List of previous student projects and Selected student project write-ups.
Other undergraduate research projects I have supervised.

And as a postscript, some rather argumentative reflections on the relationship between mathematical probability and the real world.