# My Favorite One-Liners: Part 62

In this series, I’m compiling some of the quips and one-liners that I’ll use with my students to hopefully make my lessons more memorable for them.

This is a story that I’ll tell after doing a couple of back-to-back central limit theorem problems. Here’s the first:

The chances of winning a column bet in roulette is 12/38. The bet pays 2 to 1, meaning that if you lose, you lose $1. However, if you win, you get your$1 back and $2 more. If this bet is made 1000 times, what is the probability of winning at least$0?

With my class, we solve this problem using standard techniques with the normal approximation:

$\mu = E(X) = 2 \times \displaystyle \frac{12}{38} + (-1) \frac{26}{38} = - \displaystyle \frac{1}{19}$

$E(X^2) = 2^2 \times \displaystyle \frac{12}{38} + (-1)^2 \frac{26}{38} = \displaystyle \frac{37}{19}$

$\sigma = SD(X) = \sqrt{ \displaystyle \frac{37}{19} - \left( - \displaystyle \frac{1}{19} \right)^2} = \displaystyle \frac{\sqrt{702}}{19}$

$E(T_0) = n\mu = 1000 \left( -\displaystyle \frac{1}{19} \right) \approx -52.63$

$\hbox{SD}(T_0) = \sigma \sqrt{n} = \displaystyle \frac{\sqrt{702}}{19} \sqrt{1000} \approx 44.10$

$P(T_0 > 0) \approx P\left(Z > \displaystyle \frac{0-(-52.63)}{44.10} \right) \approx P(Z > 1.193) \approx 0.1163$.

Next, I’ll repeat the problem, except playing the game 10,000 times.

The chances of winning a column bet in roulette is 12/38. The bet pays 2 to 1, meaning that if you lose, you lose $1. However, if you win, you get your$1 back and $2 more. If this bet is made 10,000 times, what is the probability of winning at least$0?

The last three lines of the above calculation have to be changed:

$E(T_0) = n\mu = 10,000 \left( -\displaystyle \frac{1}{19} \right) \approx -526.32$

$\hbox{SD}(T_0) = \sigma \sqrt{n} = \displaystyle \frac{\sqrt{702}}{19} \sqrt{10,000} \approx 139.45$

$P(T_0 > 0) \approx P\left(Z > \displaystyle \frac{0-(-526.32)}{139.45} \right) \approx P(Z > 3.774) \approx 0.00008$.

In other words, the chance of winning drops dramatically. This is an example of the Law of Large Numbers: if you do something often enough, then what ought to happen eventually does happen.

As a corollary, if you’re going to bet at roulette, you should only bet a few times. And, I’ll tell my students, one Englishman took this to the (somewhat) logical extreme by going to Las Vegas and making the ultimate double-or-nothing bet, betting his entire life savings on one bet. After all, his odds of coming out ahead by making one bet were a whole lot higher than by making a sequence of bets.

# My Favorite One-Liners: Part 40

In this series, I’m compiling some of the quips and one-liners that I’ll use with my students to hopefully make my lessons more memorable for them.

In some classes, the Greek letter $\phi$ or $\Phi$ naturally appears. Sometimes, it’s an angle in a triangle or a displacement when graphing a sinusoidal function. Other times, it represents the cumulative distribution function of a standard normal distribution.

Which begs the question, how should a student pronounce this symbol?

I tell my students that this is the Greek letter “phi,” pronounced “fee”. However, other mathematicians may pronounce it as “fie,” rhyming with “high”. Continuing,

Other mathematicians pronounce it as “foe.” Others, as “fum.”

# In-class demo: The binomial distribution and the bell curve

Many years ago, the only available in-class technology at my university was the Microsoft Office suite — probably Office 95 or 98. This placed severe restrictions on what I could demonstrate in my statistics class, especially when I wanted to have an interactive demonstration of how the binomial distribution gets closer and closer to the bell curve as the number of trials increases (as long as both $np$ and $n(1-p)$ are also decently large).

The spreadsheet in the link below is what I developed. It shows

• The probability histogram of the binomial distribution for $n \le 150$
• The bell curve with mean $\mu = np$ and standard deviation $\sigma = \sqrt{np(1-p)}$
• Also, the minimum and maximum values on the $x-$axis can be adjusted. For example, if $n = 100$ and $p = 0.01$, it doesn’t make much sense to show the full histogram; it suffices to have a maximum value around 5 or so.

In class, I take about 3-5 minutes to demonstrate the following ideas with the spreadsheet:

• If $n$ is large and both $np$ and $n(1-p)$ are greater than 10, then the normal curve provides a decent approximation to the binomial distribution.
• The probability distribution provides exact answers to probability questions, while the normal curve provides approximate answers.
• If $n$ is small, then the normal approximation isn’t very good.
• If $n$ is large but $p$ is small, then the normal approximation isn’t very good. I’ll say in words that there is a decent approximation under this limit, namely the Poisson distribution, but (for a class in statistics) I won’t say much more than that.

Doubtlessly, there are equally good pedagogical tools for this purpose. However, at the time I was limited to Microsoft products, and it took me untold hours to figure out how to get Excel to draw the probability histogram. So I continue to use this spreadsheet in my classes to demonstrate to students this application of the Central Limit Theorem.