SME430: History of Mathematics

Week 14 - Probability & Statistics

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 Itinerary

Announcements
Biographies
Timeline
Finishing Calculus Activity
Honors Option - Cryptography
Break
Discussion
“Let’s Make a Deal” Activity
Closing

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Blaise Pierre de
Pascal Fermat

Pierre-Simon Gerolamo
Laplace Cardano

Biographies
3
Timeline
4
Mathematics Timeline
1600 a.d. - 1800 a.d.

5
 1600 – 1650 AD
1605 Kepler discovers first law of planetary motion.

1609 Galileo develops his first telescope.

1624 William Oughtred invents a slide rule.

1636 W. Gascoigne invents the micrometer.

1642 Frenchmen, Blaise Pascal invents an adding

machine.

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 1651 – 1699 AD
1671 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz invents a calculating
machine.

1673 Gottfried Leibnitz invents his calculus.

1675 Isaac Newton invents an algorithm for the

computation of functional roots

1687 Newton publishes Philosophiae Naturalis Principia

Mathematica.

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 17 th Century
By the end of the 17th century, a scientific
revolution had occurred and science had become
an established mathematical, mechanical, and
empirical body of knowledge.

Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Isaac

Newton, and others had become noted scientists.

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 1700 – 1750 AD
1704 Isaac Newton publishes Opticks

1712 Brook Taylor develops Taylor's series

1733 Geralamo Saccheri studies what geometry

would be like if Euclid's fifth postulate were false

1750 Thomas Wright discusses galaxies and the

shape of the Milky Way

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 1751 – 1799 AD
1752 Benjamin Franklin shows that lightning is
electricity.
1788 Joseph Lagrange presents his equations of
motion in Mechanique Analytique.
1795 Pierre Laplace discusses Newtonian black holes
1798 Henry Cavendish measures the gravitational
constant and determines the mass of the Earth.
1799 Karl Gauss proves that every polynomial
equation has a solution among the complex
numbers.

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 18 th Century
The 18th century was also part of the "The Age of
Enlightenment", an historical period characterized
by a change away from traditional religious sources
of authority, and a move towards science and
rational thought.

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Calculus Activities (Presentations)

Take 5 minutes in your groups to finish/go over

your presentations.
Each group will have ~8 minutes to present their
poster.
Make sure you’ve described how your activity
may be related to Calculus.

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Cryptography
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Break - 10 minutes
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 Discussion of Probability
Design your own dice game (similar to the one
listed on page 165). Describe the rules of the
game, and describe how you would calculate the
mathematical expectation of winning.
How could the expected value of a game be
related to the cost to play the game?
What advantages became available by looking at
the expected outcomes of events instead of just
describing equally likely outcomes?

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 Discussion of Statistics

What is the relationship between data and statistics?

How are statistics and probability related?
How would you design an experiment to test the
fastest route by car from Brody Hall to Hubbard
Hall? How would you control for error? Does this
prove that one route is faster than the other?
What different designs did you use?
What different variables did you come up with?
What can you conclude?

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 Let’s Make a Deal - Rules
• Host offers you 3 doors
• 1 door has great prize
• 2 doors have nothing
• After making your choice, the host (who
knows where the good prize is) opens
one of the doors you didn’t choose and
reveals one of the empty doors.

• The host then gives you the option to

switch your door if you want to, or you
can stay with your original door.

• What do you do?

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 Let’s Make a Deal - Rules
• Get with a partner, each pair should have two tally sheets, one set of
cups, and one penny “prize”

• To start, one person will be the host and the other will be the contestant
for 30 trials.

• Each tally sheet is unique and already has listed where the prize will
be hidden for each trial. Don’t let the contestant see your list.

• For each trial, keep track if

the contestant stayed or switched after one
of the empty doors was revealed, and if they ended up winning or
loosing that trial.

• Switch roles for 30 additional trials with the other tally sheet.
• Tally your results and add your data to the Excel table up front.
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 What’s going on here?

This chart shows what all

possible outcomes of the
game are

Blue = Stay to win

Red = Switch to win

From http://math.ucsd.edu/~crypto/Monty/montybg.html

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The key to this advantage

What happens when the

host doesn’t know where
the good prize is?

From http://math.ucsd.edu/~crypto/Monty/montybg.html

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 Marilyn vos Savant

Listed in 1986 Guinness Book of World Records

as having the highest IQ
Columnist in Parade Magazine
Asked question in 09/09/90 column about
Monty Hall problem.
http://www.marilynvossavant.com/index.php

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 Homework
Read Sketches
24 - The Arithmetic of Reasoning (Logic and
Boolean Algebra) - p. 181-184
25 - Beyond Counting (Infinity and the
Theory of Sets) - p. 185-190
Respond to the Discussion Forum on ANGEL
(already posted)
Bring your portfolios next week for an activity

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Discussion of Probability

• Design your own dice game (similar to the one listed on page 165). Describe
the rules of the game, and describe how you would calculate the
mathematical expectation of winning.

• How could the expected value of a game be related to the cost to play the
game?

• What advantages became available by looking at the expected outcomes of

events instead of just describing equally likely outcomes?

Discussion of Statistics

• What is the relationship between data and statistics?

• How are statistics and probability related?

• How would you design an experiment to test the fastest route by car from
Brody Hall to Hubbard Hall? How would you control for error? Does this
prove that one route is faster than the other?

o What different designs did you use?

o What different variables did you come up with?

o What can you conclude?