In this first video, Fry and Laurie present a calculated bit of mathematical levity [HT Jennifer Ouellette]: In the following video, Professor Bikash Kumar Dey of the Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Bombay, presents 58 minutes without levity. It’s his famous “Lecture – 22 Probability of Error Calculation”. Enjoy, if you will: BONUS: “Lecture – 24 […]
Tag: error
A sheepish admission about my new book
My new book — This Is Improbable — has its official UK/US publication date this Thursday. September 6. Before it comes out, I have to make an embarrassing admission. Foyles bookstore asked me to do up a little essay for their blog. I decided to write the confession as part of that essay. Here’s the […]
The unexpected end of 2011 (an Ig Nobel tribute)
This year, 2011, is ending—unexpectedly—in December. To celebrate, we pay tribute to the winners of this year’s Ig Nobel Prize in mathematics. The prize was awarded to: Dorothy Martin of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1954), Pat Robertson of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1982 [and whose book is pictured […]
How long isn’t the Rhine river?
Something doesn’t add up, as they say, with the Rhine River. Earth Times reports: Reports of Rhine’s length exaggerated and erroneous, academic finds Cologne, Germany – Most of the world’s encyclopaedias and textbooks are misstating the length of Europe’s Rhine river after somebody accidentally added 90 kilometres about half a century ago, an observant academic […]