http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
1 online resource (xv, 241 pages) : illustrations.
The purpose of "The Pleasures of Probability" is to introduce some of the most fundamental ideas in classical probability to a fairly general audience - reaching from mathematical amateurs to scientists, from students to professional mathematicians. The only prerequisites required are a decent background in elementary algebra and an interest in discussions of a variety of problems and applications in probability. The style is informal, and the chapters are more like essays on a particular topic than textbook treatments. Even well-known problems are often covered in more depth than usual in order to illustrate underlying ideas. The book can be used as a text for a first course in probability or as a companion to a text. Each chapter ends with a few problems, the answers to which are given at the end of the book.
Cars, goats, and sample spaces -- How to count: birthdays and lotteries -- Conditional probability: from kings to prisoners -- The formula of Thomas Bayes and other matters -- The idea of independence, with applications -- A little bit about games -- Random variables, expectations, and more about games -- Baseball cards, the law of large numbers, and bad news for gamblers -- From traffic to chocolate chip cookies with the Poisson Distribution -- The desperate case of the gambler's ruin -- Breaking sticks, tossing needles, and more: probability on continuous sample spaces -- Normal distributions, and order from diversity via the central limit theorem -- Random numbers: what they are and how to use them -- Computers and probability -- Statistics: applying probability to make decisions -- Roaming the number line with a Markov chain: dependence -- The Brownian motion, and other processes in continuous time.
Includes bibliographical references (pages [235]-237) and index.