THE SIGN OF THE FOUR (SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE) AND LAW OF LARGE NUMBERS

“Winwood Reade is good upon the subject,” said Holmes. “He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician. But do I see a handkerchief? Surely there is a white flutter over yonder.”

We can say the topic of this text is the application of Law of Large Numbers to human behaviour. And this is precisely the aim that many Social Sciences are dreaming of, in order to achieve prestige.

You cannot foretell what you will get when you flip a coin once, but thanks to this law, you can indeed delimit the number of heads or tails if you throw it 5000 times.

INCENDIES (DENIS VILLENEUVE) AND PURE MATHEMATICS

We haven´t posted a film on this blog for long time. So, here it is Incendies, a Canadian film that everyone who has watched it, is looking forward to discussing about with someone.

I recommended it to my sister and she hasn´t forgiven me yet, because she didn´t like it at all. This scene shows why mathematicians are so weird and besides, we´re told about Siracusa conjecture, although very few mathematicians know it by this name.