Month: November 2019

Fractions: What Are They, and Why?

We’ve looked at some specific ideas about fractions (their proper definition, their relationship to decimals, and how to divide them); it’s time to go through this topic from the beginning. Here we’ll look at how they are introduced to beginners, and how to keep them from hurting our brains! Parts of a whole Although, as …

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Rank of a Binary Number

(A new question of the week) A few months ago, I wrote about Ranking a Word Among Its Permutations, that is, finding where a word would be found in an ordered list of all possible “words” made by permuting its letters. The problem in general requires a (sometimes lengthy) algorithm. A month or so later, …

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More About Independent Events

Last time, we looked at the basic definition of independent events. This time I want to explore some deeper questions about the concept. Independence by the numbers We’ve seen that, informally, we think of independent events as not affecting one another’s probabilities. Mathematically, though, independence is defined by the fact (which is implied by that …

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What Are Independent Events?

The concept of independent events can be both very simple and easily misunderstood. We’ll be looking at several explanations of the idea, starting with the basics and then digging into some deeper questions that are often overlooked. What is independence? We can start with this question from 1998, asking for the basics: Independent and Dependent …

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