Student Puzzle Corner
The deadline for the student puzzle about phase transitions has been extended to December 1. If you’re a student member, email us your solution: bulletin@imstat.org

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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…

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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 Y1,Y2, are iid with $E(Y_i) = \sum_{i =…

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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…

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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…

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