Requirements: A coin for each student & smart board or data projector.
First ask your students to toss a coin 10 times each.
Ask each student how many heads in a row they threw.
Now ask students ‘Do you think it is possible to throw 10 heads in a row?
It can be done. Here is how you do it.
Derren Brown is a UK mentalist, magician, hypnotist and maths guru. He’s awesome. He shows audiences how a lack of understanding maths, especially probability, leads to misinterpreting the facts.
This is the most awesome way to introduce probability.
Mentalist Derren Brown devises a foolproof gambling system. He sends a girl , Kadisha, the number of a winning horse in race to be run the next day. It wins. He sends her the winning horse and race number 4 more times. She ends up with winnings close to £ 1000 before the final race. Derren convinces her to borrow money for the last bet. She does. She places £4,000 on a horse. Did it win?????
Watch Part 5 of The System
If you are not convinced Derren Brown can come up with a foolproof system for horse race tipping, let me explain The System. He took 7,776 e-mail addresses, divided them into 6 equal groups and sent each group a different number for a horse in a 6 horse race to be run the next day. Naturally, one group of 1296 had been given the winning horse number. This group was divided into 6 again and given the number of the ‘winning’ in a six horse race the next day and so on.
Race 1: 7776
Race 2: 1296
Race 3: 216
Race 4: 36
Race 5: 6
Out of 7776 punters, only one punter was given in advance five horse race winners in a row. Was it Kadisha. You will have to watch the Youtube above.
You can watch THE SYSTEM in full here. It takes 47 mins.
And the Oscar for Best Mathematical Performance Goes to …..
Ben Zauzmer
Ben Zauzmer, a Harvard Applied Math graduate who has a 75 per cent success rate in predicting the winners of Oscar Awards every year, has correctly predicted 20 of 21 winners in 2018 Oscars, which is a success rate of 95%.
How does he do it? He gathers thousands of data points on Oscar ceremonies over the past two decades – such as categories movies are nominated in, other award results, and aggregate critic scores – and he uses statistics to calculate how good a predictor each of those metrics is in each Oscar category. Then, he plugs in the numbers and that gives him the % chance that each film will win in each category according to theBoston Globe.
Ben, who writes for The Hollywood Reporter, uses his mathematical model to produceBar Graphs like this:
This year the Best Picture was a close call, but Ben’s Mathematical Prediciton was correct.
Australia takes it’s sharks very seriously. Shark detecting drones are being trialled on beaches in NSW as a part of the NSW Government’s $16 million Shark Management Strategy.
The film JAWS has given sharks a bad rap. Here are the STATS:
Deaths by shark attack in the world:
Australia About 2 a year
USA 1 every 2 years
UK None EVER
CANADA None EVER
More deaths occur due to falling off chairs in Australia. Quad bikes are deadly anywhere.
The reason for waiting until the bear is 15 ft away is to make sure the spray doesn’t disperse in the air. If the Pepper Spray is too spread out it will not stop the bear.
This is mental maths, but not hard maths. You can play this video by Marco Frezza directly to the class.
Derren Brown is a UK mentalist, magician, hypnotist and maths guru. He’s awesome. He shows audiences how a lack of understanding maths, especially probability, leads to misinterpreting the facts.
Mentalist Derren Brown devises a foolproof gambling system. He sends a girl , Kadisha, the number of a winning horse in race to be run the next day. It wins. He sends her the winning horse and race number 4 more times. She ends up with winnings close to £ 1000 before the final race. Derren convinces her to borrow money for the last bet. She does. She places £4,000 on a horse. Did it win?????
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