probability – Quanta Magazine

Perplexing the Web, One Probability Puzzle at a Time

Erica Klarreich — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 14:00:56 +0000

In late January, Daniel Litt posed an innocent probability puzzle on the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) — and set a corner of the Twitterverse on fire. Imagine, he wrote, that you have an urn filled with 100 balls, some red and some green. You can’t see inside; all you know is that someone determined the number of red balls by picking a number between zero and 100 from a hat.

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Michel Talagrand Wins Abel Prize for Work Wrangling Randomness

Jordana Cepelewicz — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 11:00:17 +0000

Random processes take place all around us. It rains one day but not the next; stocks and bonds gain and lose value; traffic jams coalesce and disappear. Because they’re governed by numerous factors that interact with one another in complicated ways, it’s impossible to predict the exact behavior of such systems. Instead, we think about them in terms of probabilities...

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Maze Proof Establishes a ‘Backbone’ for Statistical Mechanics

Leila Sloman — Wed, 07 Feb 2024 16:12:53 +0000

Imagine that a grid of hexagons, honeycomb-like, stretches before you. Some hexagons are empty; others are filled by a 6-foot tall column of solid concrete. The result is a maze of sorts. For over half a century, mathematicians have posed questions about such randomly generated mazes. How big is the largest web of cleared paths? What are the chances that there is a path from one edge to the center...

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The Surprisingly Simple Math Behind Puzzling Matchups

Patrick Honner — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 16:20:30 +0000

It’s the championship game of the Imaginary Math League, where the Atlanta Algebras will face the Carolina Cross Products. The two teams haven’t played each other this season, but earlier in the year Atlanta defeated the Brooklyn Bisectors by a score of 10 to 5, and Brooklyn defeated Carolina by a score of 7 to 3. Does that give us any insight into who will take the title? Well, here’s one line of...

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A Close-Up View Reveals the ‘Melting’ Point of an Infinite Graph

Kelsey Houston-Edwards — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 16:10:24 +0000

In 2008, the mathematician Oded Schramm died in a hiking accident in the Cascade mountains some 50 miles east of Seattle. Though he was just 46 years old, he had constructed entirely new areas of mathematics. “He was a fantastic mathematician,” said Itai Benjamini, a mathematician at the Weizmann Institute of Science and Schramm’s friend and collaborator. “Extremely creative, extremely elegant...

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