this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
6 points (100.0% liked)

math

804 readers
12 users here now

General community for all things mathematics on @lemmy.world

Submit link and text posts about anything at all related to mathematics.

Questions about mathematical topics are allowed, but NO HOMEWORK HELP. Communities for general math and homework help should be firmly delineated just as they were on reddit.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I’m picturing the math as a very large set of bell curves where most people fall somewhere in the middle, but each person is likely to be an outlier on at least one.

top 7 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Lay definitions of "rare" or "unlikely" tend to break down on this type of question.

If you've ever played chess, you've had an experience that's entirely unique to you. In almost all cases, that exact game you played with the color you played in it has never in the history of the world happened to any other person. That's a rare experience. So as phrased, the answer to your question is yes.

The underlying question could be more accurately phrased as "at least one rare experience that would be categorized by a human's brain as a salient and simple experience indicative of further analysis to discern an underlying pattern where in fact none exists, and it's just statistical noise," but that's not a mathematical enough question to be analyzable within the confines of pure statistics.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I see, and I suppose if you index it by place/time it’s even more obvious that people are always experiencing unique things in a way so it’s true but kind of vacuous?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The example that comes to mind is the Birthday Problem.

If you are in a room with 22 other people, there is a 22 in 365 chance one of them shares your birthday. Relatively unlikely. But there is a 50% chance there are two people in the room that share a birthday. Much more likely.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Very interesting, that does seem similar

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I don't have an answer to your question, but a recent radiolab was dealing with this sort of stuff. Maybe you'd be interested, it might be a bit too casual for your liking, not exactly a deep mathematics podcast.

https://pca.st/episode/23c3d299-cf9a-4ec8-a769-5b98db663270

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for the rec! Not a mathematician and happy to ingest food for thought npr style.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

You're welcome, I bet you'll like it. There was actually another math one a couple weeks ago called zeroworld, it's about dividing by zero and stuff.