Math Geek: From Klein Bottles to Chaos Theory, a Guide to the Nerdiest Math Facts, Theorems, and Equations by Rosen Raphael

Author:Rosen, Raphael [Rosen, Raphael]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: F+W Media
Published: 2015-03-04T22:00:00+00:00

PANCAKE DAY

Also known as Shrove Tuesday, Pancake Day is a time for Catholics to indulge in foods made with sugar and butter before Lent, a traditional period of fasting and repentance.

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Math Gets Its Day in Court

MATHEMATICAL CONCEPTS: PROBABILITY AND STATISTICS, PROSECUTOR’S FALLACY

A LOGICAL FALLACY is an error in one’s reasoning process, so that even if you begin with facts, you end up with a wrong conclusion. Sometimes logical fallacies deal with probability, that traditional mathematical topic. And in some cases, logical fallacies that deal with probability can help determine whether a person accused of a crime is found guilty.

One such fallacy is the prosecutor’s fallacy. When a person uses this fallacy in an argument—in this case, “argument” doesn’t refer to a fight but to a series of reasoned propositions that are used to establish a point—he is trying to establish the odds of a certain event occurring. But in the process of establishing those odds he mistakenly compares the event to an irrelevant set of occurrences.

An example will help make the inner workings of the prosecutor’s fallacy more clear. A famous instance of the fallacy occurred in the 1998 trial of Sally Clark, a British woman whose two children died when they were just a few weeks old. The defense maintained that both deaths were caused by SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome), while the prosecution argued that Clark murdered both children. The prosecution based its argument on the probability that any one family would have two instances of SIDS deaths. Since dying of SIDS is rare, having two instances would be even more rare. One expert witness, Sir Roy Meadows, a pediatrician, argued that the odds of two SIDS deaths in the same family were one in 73 million. But he made two mistakes:

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