In this lecture Persi Diaconis will take a look at some of our most primitive images of chance – flipping a coin, rolling a roulette wheel and shuffling cards – and via a little bit of mathematics (and a smidgen of physics) show that sometimes things are not very random at all. Indeed chance is sometimes confused with frequency and this confusion carries over to a confusion between chance and evidence. All of which explains our wild misuse of probability and statistical models.

Persi Diaconis is the co-author of ‘Ten Great Ideas about Chance (2017) and is the Mary V. Sunseri Professor of Statistics and Mathematics at Stanford University.

5-6pm
Mathematical Institute
Oxford

Please email external-relations@maths.ox.ac.uk to register.

Watch live:
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livestream.com/oxuni/PersiDiaconis

The Oxford Mathematics Public Lectures are generously supported by XTX Markets.