Dr. David Aldous (UC Berkeley)

Title: Reflections on devising a "Probability in the Real World" course

Abstract: Undergraduate textbooks on probability often deal with "things that are like dice" and hypothetical stories that have little connection with our experience of chance outside the classroom.  As part of a broader project to articulate critically what mathematical probability says about the real world, Professor Aldous teaches an occasional course at UC, Berkeley giving 20 lectures on different, maximally diverse, topics relating to probability, and students choose some project involving new and real data.  This talk, which is completely non-technical, will describe some of the content of that course, not found in other probability courses.