9th Annual Sobel Seminar

Speaker:

David Aldous; UC Berkeley

Title:

Reflections on Devising a "Probability in the Real World" Course

Abstract:

Undergraduate textbooks on probability deal with "things that are like dice" and hypothetical stories that have little connection with our experience of chance outside the classroom. As part of a broader project to articulate critically what mathematical probability says about the real world, I give an occasional course at Berkeley in the following format. I give 20 lectures on different, maximally diverse topics and students choose some project involving new real data. In the talk, I will describe some of the content not found in other courses.