Student Puzzle Corner
In Anirban DasGupta’s latest puzzle, we’re looking at a delicate and fascinating phenomenon pervasive in mathematics and probability: phase transition. A system’s evolution is being driven or influenced by some underlying force or parameter, and when that parameter just crosses a suitable critical boundary or threshold, the system undergoes a…
Congratulations to the two student members who sent correct answers to this puzzle: Yudong Chen (University of Cambridge, UK) and Zhen Huang (Columbia University, USA). Here’s Anirban DasGupta’s solution:
Using the notation of the problem, the recorded values $Y_1, Y_2, \cdots $ are iid with
$E(Y_i) = \sum_{i =…
Here’s Anirban DasGupta’s latest puzzle. He says:
All of us were told as undergraduates, or perhaps Masters students, that an essential property of a point estimator is that it be consistent. And indeed, we usually or even always select estimators that are consistent. We are going to ask a provocative…
Contributing Editor Anirban DasGupta writes the solution to puzzle 24:
Congratulations to the four student members who sent in correct answers—some more complete than others. They are Prakash Chakraborty, Purdue University; Sihan Huang, Columbia University; Kumar Somnath, The Ohio State University; and Andrew Thomas, Purdue University.
Now for the…
Contributing Editor Anirban DasGupta sets this problem. Student members of the IMS are invited to submit solutions (to bulletin@imstat.org with subject “Student Puzzle Corner”). The deadline is June 25, 2019.
Here’s Anirban’s latest puzzle. He says:
To encourage many students to send an answer, we’re posing a very simple problem …