probability

Lotteries and Pascal's Mugging

Most have heard of Pascal’s wager, but have you heard of the thought experiment known as Pascal’s mugging? The mugging attempts to reframe the essence of the wager argument using only finite values, thereby getting around some standard objections to the wager argument.

Does it ever make sense to play the Lottery?

In a first semester probability course, students encounter combinatorics and point estimates such as the mean and median of a data set. A common example is the low odds of winning the lottery.

Life Expectancy Data

A look at the distribution of age at death based on social security mortality tables to see how long we can expect to be in retirement for.