Balls in Boxes: Variations on a Theme of Warren Ewens and Herbert Wilf
Statistics Theory
2011-06-29 v1 Statistics Theory
Abstract
We comment on, elaborate, and extend the work of Warren Ewens and Herbert Wilf, described in their http://www.pnas.org/content/104/27/11189.full.pdf about the maximum in balls-and-boxes problem. In particular we meta-apply their ingenious method to show that it is not really needed, and that one is better off using the so-called Poisson Approximation, at least in applications to the real world, because extremely unlikely events mever happen in real life. This article is accompanied by the Maple package http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/tokhniot/BallsInBoxes">BallsInBoxes.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1106.5531,
title = {Balls in Boxes: Variations on a Theme of Warren Ewens and Herbert Wilf},
author = {Shalosh B. Ekhad and Doron Zeilberger},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1106.5531},
year = {2011}
}
Comments
13 pages; Dedicated to Herbert Saul Wilf on his 80th birthday