Monthly Archives: March 2014

Examples

Introduction to Python Programming

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Here is a link to my sample Python code.

One of the somewhat unforeseen consequences of taking a career in applied mathematics, particularly in this day and age, is that you will eventually need to write computer programs that implement the mathematical algorithms. There are several languages in which one can do this, each with its own positives and negatives and you will find that things that are simple in some are difficult in another. After speaking with a number of people, both students and professionals who work with mathematics on a regular basis, I reasoned that it may be helpful to provide some source code examples to help mathematicians get started with programming in some of these languages. I decided to start with Python because its a powerful language, available for free, and its learning curve isn’t too steep.

I will be working with Python 2.7, which can be downloaded from https://www.python.org/download/releases/2.7/. I understand, however, that a limitation to coding is the required setup often necessary before one can even write their first line of code. So while I do encourage you to download Python, I will also provide a link to the online Python compiler at Compile Online, which should allow users to simply copy and paste the code into a new tab in their browser and by simply clicking the “Execute Script” command in the upper left corner, see the output of the code.

With that being said, here is a link to my sample Python code.

Blog, Examples

Probability: Sample Spaces

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I’ve been doing a few games lately (can be seen here, here and here) and, while I think those are very good ways to become interested in some of the avenues of math research, I also have had a few people come to me with questions regarding help with their classes. So I decided to write a script to try to help understand some elementary probability theory, focusing on discrete sample spaces.

Probability Image

In statistics, any process of observation is referred to as an experiment.
The set of all possible outcomes of an experiment is called the sample space and it is usually denoted by S. Each outcome in a sample space is called an element of the sample space. An event is a subset of the sample space or which the event occurs. Two events are said to be mutually exclusive if they have no elements in common.

Similar to set theory, we can form new events by performing operations like unions, intersections and compliments on other events. If A and B are any two subsets of a sample space S, then their union A ∪ B is the subset of S that contains all the elements that are in either A, in B, or in both; their intersection A ∩ B is the subset of S that contains all the elements that are in both A and B; the compliment A’ of A is the subset of S that contains all the elements of S that are not in A.

A probability is a function that assigns real numbers to events of a sample space. The following are the axioms of probability that apply when the sample space is discrete (finite or countable).

Axiom 1: The probability of an event is a non-negative real number; that is P(A) ≥ 0 for any subset A of S.
Axiom 2: The probability of the entire sample space is 1; that is P(S) = 1.
Axiom 3: If A1, A2, A3, … , is a finite or infinite sequence of mutually exclusive events of S, then
P(A1 ∪ A2 ∪ A3 ∪ …) = P(A1) + P(A2) + P(A3) + …
If A and B are any two events in a sample space S and P(A) ≠ 0, the conditional probability of B given A is

P(B | A) =
P(A ∩ B)

P(A)

Two events A and B are independent if and only if P(A | B) = P(A) ∙ P(B).