How many people need to be crowded into a room before two of them are likely to have the same birthday? The answer is a mere 23 to have a fifty-fifty shot. To bring the probability to ninety-nine percent, you need a crowd of only 57 people. And yet there are three hundred and sixty-five […]
“It is a small world, isn’t it? You are on holiday in the Pyrenees. You write a postcard to a friend at home and set off to post it. Then who should you meet but that same friend coming up the street. This not only saves you the cost of a stamp but it also provides […]
In 1957, Mrs. William Beston of Morristown, New Jersey, had gave birth to her twelfth daughter. Read the full story and children’s names here. What are the odds of having 12 daughters and no sons? If the probability of having a girl is 1/2, then the chance of having a dozen girls in a row […]
Blaise Pascal, the famous French mathematician was not allowed to study the Geometry of Euclid by his father. So, young Blaise worked out the principles of Geometry that Euclid had done centuries before. He also revived the ancient Chinese “mystery triangle” of numbers that looked like this: Heads and Tails Pascal’s Triangle can show you […]
My sister and her husband have just been visiting Christchurch, where a devastating earthquake destroyed much of the inner city and many lives were lost. Today, she was out of town when a force 4 quake hit the city, but she was back in town when another one struck. Then today we heard news of […]
There are some great probability activities that students can use to test their skills and mathematical knowledge, or just to experiment with the laws of chance that are so much part of insurance, etc. Here is a great online interactive probability activity that you might enjoy;
The Science cartoon below brings up the whole idea of how often things happen. What is chance? How can we determine that something is certain? This part of Mathematics is often referred to as Probability. “It is frequently stated in books and articles on probability that if a succession of monkeys were set before a […]
