X-Nico

2 unusual facts about probability


Probability

He gave two proofs, the second being essentially the same as John Herschel's (1850).

Probably

Probability, the chance that something is likely to happen or be the case


Andrei Bely

Nikolai Bugaev was well known for his influential philosophical essays, in which he decried geometry and probability and trumpeted the virtues of hard analysis.

Anurag Dikshit

"I came to believe there was a high probability it was in violation of U.S. laws", Dikshit told U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff in New York, referring to PartyGaming’s activity.

Battle of Deorham

The military historian Lieutenant-Colonel Alfred Burne, employing his theory of 'Inherent Military Probability' opted for a simpler explanation for the battle than Clair-Baddeley.

Bernstein polynomial

Suppose K is a random variable distributed as the number of successes in n independent Bernoulli trials with probability x of success on each trial; in other words, K has a binomial distribution with parameters n and x.

Chronic fatigue syndrome treatment

Both CBT and GET passed common criteria for cost-effectiveness, and also had a higher probability of being the most cost-effective when compared to the APT and SMC groups.

Circular ensemble

These probability density functions are referred to as Jacobi distributions in the theory of random matrices, because correlation functions can be expressed in terms of Jacobi polynomials.

CMB cold spot

The probability of finding a deviation at least as high in Gaussian simulations was found to be 1.85%.

Conformal cyclic cosmology

In 2010, Penrose and Vahe Gurzadyan published a preprint of a paper claiming that observations of the cosmic microwave background made by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe and the BOOMERanG experiment showed concentric anomalies which were consistent with the CCC hypothesis, with a low probability of the null hypothesis that the observations in question were caused by chance.

Copenhagen interpretation

# The description of nature is essentially probabilistic, with the probability of a given outcome of a measurement given by the square of the modulus of the amplitude of the wave function.

Crimean Goths

In "The Crimean Tatars: the diaspora experience and the forging of a nation" By Brian Glyn Williams they quote Vozgrin as saying; 'In all probability their descendents are the Tatars of a series of villages in the Crimea, who are sharply delineated from the inhabitants of neighboring villages by their tall height and other features characteristic of Scandinavians.

Criticism of science

Examples in Britain include the controversy over the MMR inoculation, and the 1988 forced resignation of a government minister, Edwina Currie, for revealing the high probability that battery eggs were contaminated with Salmonella.

De Finetti

de Finetti usually refers to the Italian probabilist and statistician Bruno de Finetti, noted for the "operational subjective" conception of probability.

Evidential reasoning

Probabilistic logic, a combination of the capacity of probability theory to handle uncertainty with the capacity of deductive logic to exploit structure

Formal epistemology

Stephan Hartmann (Bayesian epistemology, probability, collective decision-making, etc.)

Francesco Paolo Cantelli

Cantelli's later work was all on probability and it is in this field where his name graces the Borel–Cantelli lemma and the Glivenko–Cantelli theorem.

Gauss–Markov

The Gauss–Markov theorem in mathematical statistics (In this theorem, one does not assume the probability distributions are Gaussian.)

Hicks Building

The building houses the departments of Physics and Astronomy, the Chemistry and Physics Workshop (formally known as the Central Mechanical Workshops) and the School of Mathematics and Statistics, which comprises the departments of Probability and Statistics, Applied Mathematics and Pure Mathematics.

Himalia group

Numerical integrations show a high probability of collisions among the members of the prograde group during the lifespan of the solar system (e.g. on average 1.5 collisions between Himalia and Elara).

Implicit learning

The original probability learning experiment was developed by Lloyd Humphreys in 1939.

Indifference

Principle of indifference, in probability theory, a rule for assigning epistemic probabilities

Johan de Witt

Edmond Halley’s (of comet fame) representation of the life annuity dates to 1693, when he re-expressed a life annuity as the discounted value of each annual payment multiplied by the probability of surviving long enough to receive the payment and summed until there are no survivors.

La Combattante IIIb-class fast attack craft

For the four Combattante III fast attack craft, Thales Nederland will deliver a TACTICOS combat management system, including four multifunctional operator consoles, one surveillance radar, one fire control tracking system, one electro-optical tracking and fire control system, an integrated low probability of interception radar, two target designation sights and a tactical data link.

Laser science

Albert Einstein created the foundations for the laser and maser in 1917, via a paper in which he re-derived Max Planck’s law of radiation using a formalism based on probability coefficients (Einstein coefficients) for the absorption, spontaneous emission, and stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation.

Leapfrog integration

Because of its time-reversibility, and because it is a symplectic integrator, leapfrog integration is also used in Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, a method for drawing random samples from a probability distribution whose overall normalization is unknown.

Leeway

The Search and Rescue Optimal Planning System (SAROPS) and the Norwegian SAR model compute the net trajectory of search objects and provide a probability density area based upon Monte Carlo methods.

Lester Dubins

Besides probability, some of these were on curves of minimal length under constraints on curvature and initial and final tangents (see Dubins path), Tarski's circle squaring problem, convex analysis, and geometry.

Marcus Vulson de la Colombière

By all probability, until 1635 he was staying in Grenoble as he was a royal counselor in the Dauphiné parliament (conseiller du roi en la cour de parlement de Dauphiné).

Marital rape

David Finkelhor and Kersti Yllo published a study in 1985 on martial rape that drew on a scientifically-selected area probability sample from the metropolitan Boston area of 323 women who were married or previously married who had a child living with them between the ages of six and fourteen.

Martin Feldstein

The New York Times wrote an editorial advocating that Bush choose either Feldstein or Ben Bernanke due to their credentials, and the week of the nomination The Economist predicted that the two men had the greatest probability of selection out of the field of candidates.

Master equation

When the connections are time-independent rate constants, the master equation represents a kinetic scheme, and the process is Markovian (any jumping time probability density function for state i is an exponential, with a rate equal to the value of the connection).

Mehler kernel

It can be written as an infinite series involving the one dimensional probability densities and Hermite polynomials of x and y (see the link to Slepian).

Mixing time

Markov chain mixing time, the time to achieve a level of homogeneity in the probability distribution of a state in a Markov process.

Neutron activation

The Castle Bravo accident, in which the thermonuclear bomb test at Enewetak Atoll in 1954 exploded with 2.5 times the expected yield, was caused by the unexpectedly high probability of this reaction.

Optimal decision

given a decision d, we know the probability distribution for the possible outcomes described by the conditional probability density d).

Optometry

However, in 1907 Professor Berthold Laufer, who was a German American anthropologist, stated in his history of spectacles 'the opinion that spectacles originated in India is of the greatest probability and that spectacles must have been known in India earlier than in Europe'.

Positive outcome bias

Valence effect, a bias in prediction in which people overestimate the probability of good things happening to them.

Posterior

Posterior probability, the conditional probability that is assigned when the relevant evidence is taken into account

Prabda Yoon

In 2002, at the age of 29, he won the S.E.A. Write Award for his collection of short stories, Kwam Na Ja Pen (Probability).

Quantum ergodicity

The quantum ergodicity theorem of Shnirelman, Yves Colin de Verdière, and Zelditch states that a compact Riemannian manifold whose unit tangent bundle is ergodic under the geodesic flow is also ergodic in the sense that the probability density associated to the nth eigenfunction of the Laplacian tends weakly to the uniform distribution on the unit cotangent bundle as n → ∞.

Quantum reflection

In the simplest case, such absorption could be described with a non-Hermitian potential (i.e. one where probability is not conserved).

Quasi-likelihood

Quasi-likelihood has no role in Bayesian statistics, as this is based on a fully specified probability model for the data.

Riluzole

A Cochrane Library review states a 9% gain in the probability of surviving one year.

Samuel S. Wilks

Wilks assembled an advisory board for the journal that included major figures in statistics and probability, among them Ronald Fisher, Jerzy Neyman, and Egon Pearson.

Scheffé’s lemma

Henry Scheffé published a proof of the statement on convergence of probability densities in 1947.

Storm glass

Cecil Adams performed informal experiments with a storm glass and found that the success of prediction was no better than random probability.

William M. Gray

After the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, Gray announced that he was stepping back from the primary authorship of CSU's tropical cyclone probability forecasts, passing the role to Philip J. Klotzbach.

Win probability

The first win probability analysis was done in 1971 by Robert E. Machol and former NFL quarterback Virgil Carter.


see also