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Thanks to the efforts of our colleague Peter Doyle, we are pleased to announce that the book Introduction to Probability by Charles Grinstead and Laurie Snell has now been made freely redistributable under the terms of the GNU General Public License (‘GPL’), as published by the Free Software Foundation: Peter has written some remarks on what copyleft means as an appendix to the GNU version of our book. Here Peter writes:
The GPL is the original ‘copyleft’ license. Briefly
stated, the GPL permits you to do whatever you like with a work, as long as
you don’t prevent anyone else from doing what they like with it. We’ll
say more about the implications of this in a ninute.
We owe our ability to distribute this work under the GPL to the far-sightedness
of the American Mathematical Society. We are particularly grateful for the help
and support of John Ewing, AMS Executive Director and Publisher. At another
level, we owe our ability to distribute this work under the GPL to Richard Stallman:
inventor of ‘copyleft’; creator of the GPL; founder of the Free
Software Foundation. Copyleft is an ingenious idea. Through the GNU/Linux operating
system, and scads of other computer programs, Stallman’s idea has already
had a profound impact in the area of computer software. We believe that this
idea could transform the creation and distribution of works of other kinds,
including textbooks like this one. The distribution of this book under the GPL
can be viewed as an experiment to see just where the idea of copyleft may take
us.
The AMS continues to distribute a version of this book in
printed form: Those who wish to use the book in a course are invited to
contact the AMS at bookstore@ams.org. From the time of its first publication
in 1997, this book has been available here in pdf format for free download.
Click here for the complete version of Peter's explanation of copyleft and the GNU contract.
We hope that having our book under the GNU contract will enrich our book and encourage others to make use of material from our book in their own writing. We will keep a list of contributions to the GNU version of our book on this website and would be happy to have additional contributions.
Contributions to the GNU version of our book.
Kemeny's Constant:
Peter Doyle
This discussion relates to Exercise 24 in Chapter 11 concerning "Kemeny's
Constant" and the question: Should Peter have been given the prize?
Hedging Huygens:
Peter Doyle
In the historical remarks for section 6.1, we describe Huygen's approach to
expected value. Here Peter Doyle reworks this approach to show connections with
modern ideas such fair markets and hedging. He illustrate the limitation of
hedging using a variant of the St. Petersburg Paradox.
A local limit theorem for sampling without replacement:
Marvin Pinsky
In Feller's Introduction to Probability theory and Its Applications,
volume 1, 3d ed, p. 194, exercise 10, there is formulated a version of the local
limit theorem which is applicable to the hypergeometric distribution, which
governs sampling without replacement. In the simpler case of sampling with replacement,
the classical DeMoivre-Laplace theorem is applicable. Feller's conditions seem
too stringent for applications and are difficult t to prove. It is the purpose
of this note to re-formulate and prove a suitable limit theorem with broad applicability
to sampling from a finite population which is suitably large in comparison to
the sample size.
Other resources related to our book.
Answers and Errata.
The answers to the odd-numbered problems are available here. We would be happy to provide the solutions to all of the exercises to instructors of courses that use this book. Requests should be sent to jlsnell@dartmouth.edu. We will keep here a list of errata for the book. We would appreciate hearing about additional corrections and suggestions for improvement. Send comments to jlsnell@dartmouth.edu or cgrinst1@swarthmore.edu.
Computer programs.
Our book emphasizes the use of computing to simulate experiments and make computations. We have prepared a set of programs to go with the book. We have Mathematica, Maple, and TrueBASIC versions of these programs. You can download the programs from this location. We also have experimental versions of the programs as Java applets written for us by Julian Devlin. Please contact us if you have any trouble obtaining or running these programs.
We plan to keep here links to other resources that might be helpful in teaching an introductory probability course. Please let us know if you have references for items that should be listed here.
Chance
News
Chance News abstracts current events in the news that use concepts from
probability or statistics. The abstracts include possible discussion questions
and in many cases links to the full text of the article and other related resources
are provided. If you would like to receive Chance News by e-mail send a note
to jlsnell@dartmouth.edu.
Using Lotteries in Teaching Chance Course
Bill Peterson and Laurie Snell.
This is a discussion of the way to calculate the odds and expected value for
a lottery using the powerball lottery as a model.
Programs that can be run by a browser (Applets, VRML,
etc.)
These are programs to demonstrate basic ideas of probability and statistics
that can be run from the Web using one of the standard browsers. We will try
to keep here only programs that work and do not crash your computer too often.
Chance Magazine
This is the homepage for Chance Magazine. This is a magazine of the American
Statistical Association published by Springer-Verlag. Chance Magazine may be
considered the "Scientific American" of probability and statistics.
David Griffeath's "Primordial
Soup Kitchen"
A source for all that's new in Interacting Particle Systems. Each week you find
a new and beautiful graphical picture and the recipe that produced it. Show
your students what fun they can have if they continue their study of probability.
Don
Piele's probability course.
Don Piele has here Mathematica notebooks for each of the chapters of our book.
The notebooks implement the programs used in the book. Students are asked to
run the programs and to answer questions related to the output. The workbooks
are designed to allow the students to carry out simulations and calculations
without writing programs though the code for the basic programs are provided.
Under Special Topics you will find Mathematica notebooks related to interesting
probability problems. At this time this includes the Wheaties box top problem
and a game based on a variation of the Musical Chairs. While these workbooks
were suggested by our book they would be a useful supplement to any introductory
probability book.
Probability
by Surpise.
Here Susan Holmes provides some wonderful probability applets. You can here
how she uses these in teaching in our 2000 Chance Lecture Series. Her homepage
also has a link to a detailed syllabus for the course she taught using our book.
She has added here some discussions and computer programs of her own.