Seminar (London) - Prof D Hand of Winton Capital - The Improbability Principle

Full title: The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day

Abstract: Coincidences happen, incredibly unlikely things occur, and the apparently miraculous comes about. The improbability principle says that such extraordinarily improbable events are commonplace. It shows that this is not a contradiction, but that we should expect identical lottery numbers to come up, lightning to strike twice, to meet strangers with our own name, financial crashes to occur, and ESP experiments to produce positive results. All of these and more are straightforward consequences of the five solid mathematical laws constituting the improbability principle.

Speaker: David Hand, a former president of the Royal Statistical Society, is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Imperial College, and Chief Scientific Advisor to Winton Capital Management. He has received various awards for his work, including the Guy Medal of the Royal Statistical Society and the George Box Medal. His books include Information Generation: How Data Rule Our World, Statistics: A Very Short Introduction, The Wellbeing of Nations, and, of course, The Improbability Principle.