PagesBeyond mere dice: index page for "Probability in the Real World"
This is the index page to the collection of web pages (and a few papers) written by me.
A parallel page provides a more extended overview
of the whole project including external links.
The intended readers are those who have either taken a first college course
in probability, or who have read one of the many
popular science style books on probability.
I try not to repeat too much of that material, instead choosing less familiar and less
readily available (at a non-technical level) topics.
My style goal is to be informal and succinct, to give a self-contained one page account of a
conceptual insight. If it can be backed up by math, so much the better, but I just outline the math result without doing the math.
A brief "Footnotes" section is sometimes added.
The organization of pages below is rather arbitrary.
These are all "top level" pages that can be browsed independently.
Some lead to subsidiary pages not listed here.
Highlights from a popular talk
On first meeting someone from the scientific world, to start a conversation I will often say
"tell me one interesting fact from your field that most scientists in other fields don't know".
Of course I need to be able to answer that question in return, for my field of mathematical probability,
and I imagine my counterpart, and the reader here, isn't particularly interested in
merely mathematical matters but instead in their real-world consequences.
So I haphazardly collected topics to describe in this situation.
When I started giving occasional "popular" (that is, general audience) talks it was natural to use
the same type of topics, and here are some.
Familiar math themes
Here are some familiar topics which I like to present in some less familiar way.
Many of my opening "highlights" topics could be considered paradoxes.
I mostly avoid
widely discussed paradoxes
for reasons explained in
but I do like
Attempts to apply math to real world questions
On exposition
More philosophical issues