The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Life

Statistics is used in a variety of ways in today’s society from calculating your insurance premium, what will happen in the stock market, who will win in the next Super Bowl, the outcome of the next political campaign, and other numerous events that occur in one’s life. Not many people realize how much these events skulp their life. In The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Life, Leonard Mlodinow discusses how chance, probability, and randomness reveal an astounding amount in our daily lives, and how we happen to misinterpret the significance of these events. Mlodinow informs you on those who fathered methods in some of the basic principles of probability, and how they happen to bring them about. From Cardano’s dealing in gambling in the 16th century, Galileo’s observations of how a die falls when tossed, and Pascal’s tinkering with his famous triangle. In one of the firsts chapters of The Drunkard’s Walk Mlodinow discusses how independence is key when multiplying probabilities with one another. An example that Mlodinow uses to show this is from former California supreme court case, People v. Collins, in which an elderly woman was mugger by another woman. From what witnesses reported, a woman with blonde hair in a ponytail, got into a yellow car, which was driven by a

Parade magazine’s “Ask Marilyn”, was then asked the question, “Is it to the contestants advantage to make the switch?” Marilyn replied in her column that it was better to switch. She is correct with her response, but a majority of Americans disagreed with her on it. In her estimate, she receive 10,000 letters and 92% of Americans said that she was wrong. In one letter the Marilyn received from a mathematician from George Mason University who wrote that since Monty opened one of the losing doors, that information changes the probability of the remaining two choices is