相关论文: Revisiting the name variant of the two-children pr…

Mr. Smith has two children. Given that at least one of them is a boy, how likely is it that Mr. Smith has two boys? It's a very standard puzzle in elementary books on probability theory. Whoever asks you this question hopes that you will…

A quite old problem has been recently revitalized by Leonard Mlodinow's book The Drunkard's Walk, where it is presented in a way that has definitely confused several people, that wonder why the prevalence of the name of one daughter among…

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…

Take a look around you -- in your family, your school or workplace, in the streets, and you see boys & girls in about equal proportion, and without any easily visible gender patterns in case of siblings. So, to the famous first order of…

The birthday paradox states that there is at least a 50% chance that some two out of twenty-three randomly chosen people will share the same birth date. The calculation for this problem assumes that all birth dates are equally likely. We…

The title of the article is identical to the title of Chapter 21 in Gardner (2001): because we are going to analyze the probability calculations and the ambiguity of the problem statements. We will analyze 3 out of 4 problems from Gardner…

The occurrence of Simpson's paradox (SP) in $2\times 2$ contingency tables has been well studied. The present work comprehensively revisits this problem using a combination of philosophical reflections, causal considerations, and…

The article attempts to demonstrate the rich history of one truly remarkable problem situated at the confluence of probability theory and theory of numbers - finding the probability of co-primality of two randomly selected natural numbers.…

Recently, the educational initiative TED-Ed has published a popular brain teaser coined the 'frog riddle', which illustrates non-intuitive implications of conditional probabilities. In its intended form, the frog riddle is a reformulation…

We examine the problem of family size statistics (the number of individuals carrying the same surname, or the same DNA sequence) in a given size subsample of an exponentially growing population. We approach the problem from two directions.…

We introduce a fun problem that can be considered as a variant of the classic birthday problem, the Bottleneck Birthday Problem (BBP). It is stated as: what is the maximum number of people we have to choose so that no day of the year has…

Wang et al. (2025) use statistics to argue that sex at birth is not a biological coin toss, by noticing that repeated patterns such as Male Male Male and Female Female Female occur in the Nurses Health Study more often than patterns like…

The Polignac's Conjecture, first formulated by Alphonse de Polignac in 1849, asserts that, for any even number M, there exist infinitely many couples of prime numbers P, P+M. When M = 2, this reduces to the Twin Primes Conjecture. Despite…

In 1957, Lindley published "A statistical paradox" in Biometrika, revealing a fundamental conflict between frequentist and Bayesian inference as sample size approaches infinity. We present a new paradox of a different kind: a conflict…

In this paper, a simple explanation for the Goldbach Conjecture is given. We have shown that the probability of violating the conjecture not only for the prime numbers, but also for any subset of natural numbers whose distribution is…

The thought experiment (called the clock paradox or the twin paradox)proposed by Langevin in 1911 of two observers, one staying on Earth and the other making a trip toward a star with a velocity near the light velocity is very well known…

This article brings forward an estimation of the proportion of homonyms in large scale groups based on the distribution of first names and last names in a subset of these groups. The estimation is based on the generalization of the…

We adopt an empirical approach to the characterization of the distribution of twin primes within the set of primes, rather than in the set of all natural numbers. The occurrences of twin primes in any finite sequence of primes are like…

The abc conjecture, one of the most famous open problems in number theory, claims that three positive integers satisfying a+b=c cannot simultaneously have significant repetition among their prime factors; in particular, the product of the…

Qian, Luscombe and Gerstein [J. Molecular Biol. 313 (2001) 673--681] introduced a model of the diversification of protein folds in a genome that we may formulate as follows. Consider a multitype Yule process starting with one individual in…