Student Puzzle Corner
Anirban DasGupta poses a statistical puzzle, looking at an easily understood Bayes problem that appears paradoxical at first glance, and it is hard to find a non-mathematical purely intuitive explanation for it. All PhD students in statistics most likely have seen parts of this specific problem in a standard course.…
Anirban DasGupta posed a problem that was a blend of calculus and probability, in the October/November issue. There’s still (just!) time to send your solution. The puzzle is here.…
Anirban DasGupta describes this problem as a blend of calculus and probability:
All of you know that for any given positive number α, α1/n → 1 as n → ∞. How large an n does it take to get very close to 1 if we choose α randomly? Here is…
Anirban DasGupta says this problem seems impossible at first sight, but thinks you will probably arrive at a solution quickly and it might surprise some of you that this is possible. This is the kind of thing statistics students used to learn routinely forty or fifty years ago. The problem…
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…