Remarks about the book:

Introduction to Probability is a text for a first course in probability. It is a revision of an earlier book written by the second author and published by McGraw Hill. This revision is published by the American Mathematical Society. This book can be purchased at the AMS bookstore.

We will also keep the book on the Web.

You can download the book in Adobe Portable Document Format (pdf). For this you will need the free Acrobat Reader and make this a helper for pdf documents. (Note that you must have version 3.0 or later of the Acrobat Reader.) For reading on the screen we recommend that you set the magnification to 125%. Our book emphasizes the use of computing to simulate experiments and make computations. We have prepared a set of programs to go with the book. We have Mathematica, Maple, and TrueBASIC versions of these programs. You can download the programs from this location. We also have experimental versions of the programs written for us as Java applets by Julian Devlin. Please contact us if you have any trouble obtaining or running these programs. The answers to the odd-numbered problems are available from this website.

Remarks about the course:

Instructor: Jim Baumgartner

Office: 105 Choate House

Office hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays 4-5

I am often available at other times and I am happy to meet with you if there is no other interference.

Exams: 2 midterm, 1 final

All exams will be take home, equal value.

Classroom: 105 Bradley

Our homework grader is Jonathan Wakelin. Feel free to communicate with him about the homework.

x-period Thursday 1-1:50.

Please save this period. We will use one to make up for the class missed October 19.

Final Examinatuon

The take-home final exam is here.Note that there are five questions, not four, and to read the problems you will need to have Adobe Acrobat (which most of you have). If there are difficulties let me or Kiewit know. You can work on the exam for 48 hours total, but do not discuss it with anyone else. You may submit your solutions under the door of 105 Choate House or, if you type them up, directly to Jim Baumgartner via Blitzmail. You must submit by Wednesday afternoon (say 6 pm).

 

Homework assignments

Due Wednesday, October 9

p. 35   4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14

Another assignment due Monday, October 14

p. 88   1, 3, 5, 7, 10, 13,17  and

p. 113   2, 3, 9, 15, 16, 19, 21, 22, 24

This is a long assignment, and you should be sure to deal with problems 22 and 24.

Assignment dueWednesday, November 6

p. 247  4, 5, 6, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18

Next assignment due Wednesday, November 13

p. 263,   3, 4, 7, 9, 12 and p. 289,   1, 2, 3, 7, 8