Probability in daily life

    Welcome to my blog page about mathematics! My name is Kassymkhan and I am from Kazakhstan. I graduated from the Kazakh-Turkish High School. As I was very interested in mathematics, I spent much time of my school life in studying mathematics. Mathematics encouraged me go to Nazarbayev University which is the top university of the CIS. Currently, I am the first year student of Nazarbayev University and majoring in science of mathematics. Today I will talk about probability which is one of the most interesting topics of mathematics and its examples surrounding us.

Probability is a part of mathematics that measures the chance that an event will happen. Nowadays, it is studied well enough and used in statistics, genetics and games of chance. Teachers usually explain this branch of mathematics by tossing the coin. When the coin is in the air, it has equal chances of falling with back side or with front side. It is easy to calculate that probability. Firstly, you should learn the term "factorial". The factorial is a product of consecutive numbers and it is represented as “N!”.  For example, the factorial of four is: 4!=1*2*3*4=24. If you are familiar with factorial , then you should memorize the formula below. If you are interested in probability formula, further information is here.

Image1.Probability formula

Scientists calculate the probability of any event that will occur in the same way. For example, when people buy the lottery ticket, they hope that they will win. According to probability, everyone has a negligible chance to win that lottery. Let us assume that there are one million lottery tickets for one game. So, if you have only one ticket, your chance is 1:1000000. In order to increase the chance to win, people should buy more tickets for one game. It is absolutely different from buying twenty tickets for twenty games.

Image2. Lottery is addictive

Similarly, in the games like poker which depend on six-sided dice, the probability of your winning is very small, whereas probability of your losing is more. Let us assume that the rule of game is to get 6 by tossing the single dice. In this case, probability of  your winning is 1:6, otherwise you will lose. Because of that, this type of game clubs never loses. They may recommend you free cocktails, food and beer, because they are always in profit in legal way. Even when you win, you may try to win more. This could result in losing your money won again; usually 99% of people do this.

Image3.Dices

The next example of probability is our birth. First of all, parents have equal chances to have a girl or a boy. We were all born with 50/50 chance according to the gender. However, when it comes to individual person, the chance is 1:400000000000000. This was computed by the Ali Binazir, a student of Harvard University. He calculated the chance of meeting father’s sperm with mother’s egg to get that number. Consequently, as we were chosen from four hundred quadrillion, we can say that we are very lucky people and it is time go forth and make our dreams come true. Additional information is here.

Image4.Probability of our birth

Video1.What are the odds

The probability surrounds us, because every step that we take, every move we make has a probability of resulting in good or bad. We should say “yes” and forget the word “No”, because when we say no, the probability of good result is zero. If we say yes, we have an opportunity to try and the probability of good and bad result is 50/50.

References:
Blogs.law.harvard.edu,. 2014. 'Ali Binazir » Blog Archive » What Are The Chances Of Your Coming Into Being?'. http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/abinazir/2011/06/15/what-are-chances-you-would-be-born/.
Mathforum.org,. 2014. 'Math Forum: Ask Dr. Math FAQ: Probability'. http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.prob.intro.html.
Probabilityformula.org,. 2014. 'Probability Formula'. http://www.probabilityformula.org/#.