Preface
Summary
When I was a student, a class in topology made a great impression on me. The teacher asked me and my classmates not to take notes during the first hour of his lectures. In that hour, he explained ideas and concepts from topology in a nonrigorous, intuitive way. All we had to do was listen in order to grasp the concepts being introduced. In the second hour of the lecture, the material from the first hour was treated in a mathematically rigorous way and the students were allowed to take notes. I learned a lot from this approach of interweaving intuition and formal mathematics.
This book, about probability as it applies to our daily lives, is written very much in the same spirit. It introduces the reader to the world of probability in an informal way. It is not written in a theorem-proof style. Instead, it aims to teach the novice the concepts of probability through the use of motivating and insightful examples. In the book, no mathematics are introduced without specific examples and applications to motivate the theory. Instruction is driven by the need to answer questions about probability problems that are drawn from real-world contexts. Most of the book can easily be read by anyone who is not put off by a few numbers and some high school algebra. The informal yet precise style of the book makes it suited for classroom use, particularly when more self-activation is required from students.
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- Information
- Understanding ProbabilityChance Rules in Everyday Life, pp. ix - xPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007