OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
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Oxford Mathematics Public Lecture
We all have to live with uncertainty about what is going to happen, what has happened, and why things turned out how they did. We attribute good and bad events as ‘due to chance’, label people as ‘lucky’, and (sometimes) admit our ignorance. I will show how to use the theory of probability to take apart all these ideas, and demonstrate how you can put numbers on your ignorance, and then measure how good those numbers are. Along the way we will look at three types of luck, and judge whether Derren Brown was lucky or unlucky when he was filmed flipping ten Heads in a row.
David Spiegelhalter was Cambridge University’s first Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk. He has appeared regularly on television and radio and is the author of several books, the latest of which is The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck (Penguin, September 2024).
Please email external-relations@maths.ox.ac.uk to register to attend in person.
The lecture will be broadcast on the Oxford Mathematics YouTube Channel on Wednesday 11 December at 5-6pm and any time after (no need to register for the online version).
The Oxford Mathematics Public Lectures are generously supported by XTX Markets.
