Deadline: April 25, 2021 Puzzle Editor Anirban DasGupta proposes a palindrome problem in the domain of probabilistic number theory. It will take careful thinking and patience to work out the more difficult parts of this problem. I try to give you hints, as you move from one part to the…

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The puzzle was this maximum likelihood estimation problem in a badminton game. Student Puzzle Editor Anirban DasGupta explains the solution: For part (a), writing q for p2 = cp, the likelihood function is ((1 − p)p4q4)(p4q3(1 − q))((1 − q))(q3p2(1 − p))(p5q4(1 − q)) = p29(1 − p)2(1 −…

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IMS Medallion Lecturer who was due to give his lecture at the Seminar on Stochastic Processes in March 2021 (meeting now rescheduled to 2022). Dmitry (Dima) Ioffe was born in Moscow in April 1963. In 1976 his family applied for a permission to leave the USSR for Israel…

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Physicist and computer scientist who wrote the first full implementation of the Markov chain Monte Carlo method. Arianna W. Rosenbluth passed away on December 28, 2020. Born on September 15, 1927, in Houston, Texas, Arianna attended university at the Rice Institute, now Rice University, where she received a Bachelor of…

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In 2019, Elizabeth Meckes was elected a Fellow of the IMS. She won a Simons fellowship for the 2020–2021 academic year, so she, her husband Mark, and their two children Juliette and Peter, traveled to Oxford to spend the year visiting Jon Keating. Sadly, late in 2020 she was diagnosed…

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