English

Martin Gardner's Mistake

Probability 2013-06-25 v1 History and Overview

Abstract

When Martin Gardner first presented the Two-Children problem, he made a mistake in its solution. Later he corrected the mistake in another publication, but unfortunately his incorrect solution is more widely known than his correction. In fact, a Tuesday-Child variation of this problem went viral in 2010, and the same flaw keeps reappearing in solutions for that problem as well. In this article, I would like to popularize Martin Gardner's correction and conduct a detailed discussion of the new problem.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1102.0173,
  title  = {Martin Gardner's Mistake},
  author = {Tanya Khovanova},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1102.0173},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

10 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-21T17:19:59.109Z