/probability-mosteller

Reworking of Mosteller's Challenging Problems in Probability

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Mosteller's Challenging Problems in Probability

Mordechai (Moti) Ben-Ari

Copyright 2022-23 by Moti Ben-Ari.

This work is licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.

Mosteller's problems

This is a "reworking" of Frederick Mosteller's Fifty Challenging Problems in Probability with Solutions, Dover, 1965. The problems and their solutions (50 of the 56 in the book) are presented in a manner accessible to readers with an elementary knowledge of probability, and many of the problems are accessible to secondary-school students and teachers. The problems and solutions have been rewritten to include detailed calculations and additional explanations and diagrams.

Conditional probability

Mosteller's work inspired me to investigate closely the Prisoners problem and the Monty Hall problem. An article The Slippery Slope of Conditional Probability also appears in this repository.

Files

The latest PDFs are date-stamped and appear in the top-level directory.

Mosteller's problems: The LaTeX source code of can be found in directories en and he. Python simulations of the problems can be found in the directory programs. Excel programs generously provided by Michael Woltermann (mwoltermann@washjeff.edu) can be found in directory excel.

Conditional probability: The LaTex file (English only) is in the directory slippery.