Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Theoretical and Applied Probability

Language: English Studies in English
Kind of studies: full-time studies
University website: www.hw.ac.uk
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Probability
Probability is the measure of the likelihood that an event will occur. See glossary of probability and statistics. Probability is quantified as a number between 0 and 1, where, loosely speaking, 0 indicates impossibility and 1 indicates certainty. The higher the probability of an event, the more likely it is that the event will occur. A simple example is the tossing of a fair (unbiased) coin. Since the coin is fair, the two outcomes ("heads" and "tails") are both equally probable; the probability of "heads" equals the probability of "tails"; and since no other outcomes are possible, the probability of either "heads" or "tails" is 1/2 (which could also be written as 0.5 or 50%).
Probability
My thesis, paradoxically, and a little provocatively, but nonetheless genuinely, is simply this :
PROBABILITY DOES NOT EXIST.
The abandonment of superstitious beliefs about the existence of Phlogiston, the Cosmic Ether, Absolute Space and Time, ... , or Fairies and Witches, was an essential step along the road to scientific thinking. Probability, too, if regarded as something endowed with some kind of objective existence, is no less a misleading misconception, an illusory attempt to exteriorize or materialize our true probabilistic beliefs.
Bruno de Finetti, Theory of Probability (1970), Preface
Probability
This statistical regularity in moral affairs fully establishes their being under the presidency of law. Man is now seen to be an enigma only as an individual; in the mass he is a mathematical problem.
Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844).
Probability
Probability is too important to be left to the experts. [...] The experts, by their very expert training and practice, often miss the obvious and distort reality seriously. [...] The desire of the experts to publish and gain credit in the eyes of their peers has distorted the development of probability theory from the needs of the average user. The comparatively late rise of the theory of probability shows how hard it is to grasp, and the many paradoxes show clearly that we, as humans, lack a well grounded intuition in the matter. Neither the intuition of the man in the street, nor the sophisticated results of the experts provides a safe basis for important actions in the world we live in.
Richard Hamming, The Art of Probability for Scientists and Engineers (1991), p. 4 [emphasis in original]
Scientists have investigated several aspects of jatropha cultivation in order to produce biofuels and biomass without impacting food security.
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