Please Join the SPSU Mathematics Department for a Colloquium for
General Audiences
How Can That Be Random?
Cageian Randomness, by Clarence Morgan
By
Joel Fowler
Mathematics Department
SPSU
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
3 pm D235
Coffee and Cookies at 2:30 pm
Imagine flipping a coin
many times and recording the sequence of 0's and 1's (0 for Heads and 1 for
Tails) that results. The string of characters this experiment produces
often involves patterns that few would consider to be random. And when
asked to artificially create a random string "by hand", most people
produce a result that is very unlikely to have resulted from chance alone.
In this talk we will examine this difference by determining how likely
various unexpected regular patterns are to occur in a random string. The
talk will be accessible to non-specialists, as well as non-mathematicians.