Related papers: A probabilistic way to discover the rainbow
Suppose one desires to randomly sample a pair of objects such as socks, hoping to get a matching pair. Even in the simplest situation for sampling, which is sampling with replacement, the innocent phrase "the distribution of the color of a…
Consider the following game: You are given two indistinguishable envelopes, each containing money. One contains twice as much as the other. You may pick one envelope and keep the money it contains. Having chosen an envelope, you are given…
Sampling distribution, a foundational concept in statistics, is difficult to understand, since we usually have only one realization of the estimator of interest. In this work, we present an innovative method for helping university students…
We introduce the algorithmic problem of finding a locally rainbow path of length $\ell$ connecting two distinguished vertices $s$ and $t$ in a vertex-colored directed graph. Herein, a path is locally rainbow if between any two visits of…
Packings of identical objects have fascinated both scientists and laymen alike for centuries, in particular the sphere packings and the packings of identical regular tetrahedra. Mathematicians have tried for centuries to determine the…
A perfect matching M in an edge-colored complete bipartite graph K_{n,n} is rainbow if no pair of edges in M have the same color. We obtain asymptotic enumeration results for the number of rainbow matchings in terms of the maximum number of…
Consider the coupon collector problem where each box of a brand of cereal contains a coupon and there are n different types of coupons. Suppose that the probability of a box containing a coupon of a specific type is $1/n$ and that we keep…
Various forms of sorting problems have been studied over the years. Recently, two kinds of sorting puzzle apps are popularized. In these puzzles, we are given a set of bins filled with colored units, balls or water, and some empty bins.…
We investigate the joint distribution of the vertex degrees in three models of random bipartite graphs. Namely, we can choose each edge with a specified probability, choose a specified number of edges, or specify the vertex degrees in one…
We study a game puzzle that has enjoyed recent popularity among mathematicians, computer scientist, coding theorists and even the mass press. In the game, $n$ players are fitted with randomly assigned colored hats. Individual players can…
This paper is about the Coupon collector's problem. There are some coupons, or baseball cards, or other plastic knick-knacks that are put into bags of chips or under soda bottles, etc. A collector starts collecting these trinkets and wants…
In a well-shuffled deck of cards, what is the probability that somewhere in the deck there are adjacent cards of the same rank? What is the average number of adjacent matches? What is the probability distribution for the number of matches?…
A rainbow is a captivating natural phenomenon resulting from the refraction, dispersion, and reflection of sunlight within water droplets. Traditional classroom demonstrations often focus on qualitative explanations of the formation of…
We propose a new model for forming beliefs and learning about unknown probabilities (such as the probability of picking a red marble from a bag with an unknown distribution of coloured marbles). The most widespread model for such situations…
The traditional approach to studying student understanding presents a question and uses the student answers to make inferences about their knowledge. However, this method does not capture the range of possible alternative ideas available to…
Recent empirical work has shown that human children are adept at learning and reasoning with probabilities. Here, we model a recent experiment investigating the development of school-age children's non-symbolic probability reasoning ability…
A collector samples coupons with replacement from a pool containing $g$ \textit{uniform} groups of coupons, where "uniform group" means that all coupons in the group are equally likely to occur. For each $j = 1, \dots, g$ let $T_j$ be the…
The probability of an event is in the range of [0, 1]. In a sample space S, the value of probability determines whether an outcome is true or false. The probability of an event Pr(A) that will never occur = 0. The probability of the event…
Let $S$ be a set of four points chosen independently, uniformly at random from a square. Join every pair of points of $S$ with a straight line segment. Color these edges red if they have positive slope and blue, otherwise. We show that the…
Scatterplot selection is an effective approach to represent essential portions of multidimensional data in a limited display space. Various metrics for evaluation of scatterplots such as scagnostics have been presented and applied to…