aez-notes

Here are rough worked solutions to the problems in the book Fifty Challenging Problems in Probability by Mosteller (1965) using Maxima¹. If you have not seen Maxima before I have some notes here.

@book{mosteller1965fifty,
  publisher =    {Addison-Wesley},
  year =         1965,
  title =        {Fifty challenging problems in probability with solutions},
  author =       {Mosteller, Frederick}
}

1. The Sock Drawer
2. Successive Wins
3. The Flippant Juror
4. Trials until First Success
5. Coin in Square
6. Chuck-a-Luck
7. Curing the Compulsive Gambler
8. Perfect Bridge Hand
9. Craps
10. An Experiment in Personal Taste for Money
13. The Prisoner's Dilemma
14. Collecting Coupons
15. The Theatre Row
16. Will Second-Best Be Runner-Up?
17. Twin Knights
18. An Even Split at Coin Tossing
19. Isaac Netwon Helps Samuel Pepys
20. The Three-Cornered Duel
21. Should You Sample with or without Replacement?
22. The Ballot Box
23. Ties in Matching Pennies
25. Lengths of Random Chords
26. The Hurried Duelers
27. Catching the Cautious Counterfeiter
28. Catching the Greedy Counterfeiter
29. Moldy Gelatin
30. Evening the Sales
31. Birthday Pairings
32. Finding Your Birthmate
33. Relating the birthday pairings and birthmate problems
34. Birthday holidays
35. The Cliff-Hanger
36. Gambler's Ruin
37. Bold Play vs. Cautious Play
39. The Clumsy Chemist
40. The First Ace
41. The Locomotive Problem
42. The Little End of the Stick
43. The Broken Bar
44. INCOMPLETE Winning an Unfair Game
45. Average Number of Matches
46. Probabilities of Matches
47. Choosing the Largest Dowry
48. Choosing the Largest Random Number
49. Doubling Your Accuracy
50. Random Quadratic Equations
51. Two-Dimensional Random Walk
52. Three-Dimensional Random Walk
53. Buffon's Needle
54. Buffon's Needle with Horizontal and Vertical Rulings
55. Long Needles
56. Molina's Urns