The Improbability Principle

David Hand links areas as diverse as gambling, the weather, airline disasters and creative writing as well as evolution of humans and even the origin of the universe. ‘The Improbability Principle’ will tell you what the Bible code and Shakespeare have in common, how to win the lottery, and whether dogs really can tell when their owners will return home.

Did you hear of the woman who won the lottery twice? Or the man who bumped into his neighbor when he was on holiday abroad? How can such unlikely phenomena actually happen very frequently? Indeed, why should they happen so often that we expect such occurrences?

In his highly original book – aimed squarely at anyone with an interest in coincidences, probability, gambling, or the counterintuitive behaviour of the universe – statistician David Hand answers this question by weaving together various strands of probability into a unified explanation, which he calls the improbability principle.

David Hand is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Imperial College, London, and Chief Scientific Advisor to Winton Capital Management. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and a recipient of the Guy Medal of the Royal Statistical Society. He has published 300 scientific papers and 28 books on subjects as diverse as classification, data mining, measurement, and wellbeing. His interests include psychology, physics, and finance. ‘The Improbability Principle’, was published in 2014.

Check here what the Washington Post wrote on ‘The Improbability Principle’.

 

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The Improbability Principle
Lecture by prof. David Hand
Tuesday February 17^th 2015
16.00 – 17.30 hrs
Erasmus Paviljoen
Erasmus University
Free entrance

Register here for the lecture by David Hand