Movie Theater Book Idea- The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

[hermosabeach]

I’m reading an interesting book about probability and it really makes me rethink a lot of the false
Math arguments that sales people use to twist numbers

gambling theory

lots of interesting stuff

I grabbed it on audio book from my library

 

[hermosabeach]

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives is a 2008 popular science book by American physicist and author Leonard Mlodinow, which became a New York Times bestseller and a New York Times notable book.

The Drunkard's Walk discusses the role of randomness in everyday events, and the cognitive biases that lead people to misinterpret random events and stochastic processes. The title refers to a certain type of random walk, a mathematical process in which one or more variables change value under a series of random steps. Mlodinow discusses the contributions of mathematical heavyweights Jacob Bernoulli, Pierre-Simon Laplace, and Blaise Pascal, and introduces basic statistical concepts such as regression toward the mean and the law of large numbers, while discussing the role of probability in examples from wine ratings and school grades to political polls.[1]

 

[ah1356]

Also on my bookshelf. I don’t know if this specific problem is in that book, but if you’re not familiar check out “the problem of points.”

Very short version: You are playing a game that involves flipping coins. The winner is the first to 5 (one player is heads, the other tails). Each payer puts $10 in the pot. Winner takes all. But the game gets interrupted with a score of 3-1. What is the fair way to split the pot? If you think people argue about Monty Hall...

This problem, discussed by Fermat and Pascal, is basically the birth of probability theory.