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Aaaaannd we’re done here! The exams are all graded, and final grades have been turned in. Please get in touch if you want to know your grade (but note that I cannot email exam scores or course grades). Thanks to you all.

Basic Info

• Instructor: Graham Leuschke
  Room: Heroy Auditorium
  Times: MW 2:15—3:35
• email: gjleusch at math dot syr dot edu or graham at leuschke dot org
• IM: leuschkeg on AIM, graham_leuschke on Yahoo!, or leuschke@gmail.com. (Why are there so many of these?)
• Graham’s office hours: MTW 10:00—11:00 in Carnegie 206C
• Recitation instructors: Monika Skwarnicka and Michael Demuth
• syllabus for Monday—Wednesday section
• course information.
• assigned homework problems
• Rate this professor!

Test I Wrapup

Solutions:

• version A (pink)
• version B (green)

Numerical breakdown (5-number summary plus mean and standard deviation):

• version A (pink): min=0, Q1=35, median=39, Q3 = 44.25, max=50, mean=37.925, s=9.245.
• version B (green): min=9, Q1=33, median = 40, Q3=45, max=49, mean=38.353, s=8.092.

Test II Wrapup

Solutions:

• version A (pink)
• version B (white)

Numerical breakdown (5-number summary plus mean):

• version A (pink): min=10.5, Q1=31.125, median=40, Q3 = 45.5, max=50, mean=37.0658.
• version B (white): min=16, Q1=32.5, median=37.5, Q3=44, max=50, mean=37.6266.

Notes:

• There was a lot of confusion about how to compute the standard deviation of a sample.
• People generally did far more work on problem 3 than they needed to.
• Rounding error is a very big deal: rounding .05/52 to 0.0009 makes for a huge difference in the final answer. It’s better to leave expressions like this in your calculator to take advantage of its higher accuracy.

Test III wrapup

Solutions:

• version A (yellow)
• version B (green)

Numerical breakdown (5-number summary plus mean and standard deviation):

• version A (yellow): min=19, Q1=45, median=48.25, Q3 = 49.5, max=50, mean=45.973, s=5.477.
• version B (green): min=22, Q1=44.5, median = 47.5, Q3=49, max=50, mean=45.403, s=6.077.

In technical statistical terms, you rocked the pants off this exam.

If you did not get your exam back in lecture on Wednesday, come see me to pick it up.

Links o’ the day

• the pictures you drew on Test III (you rock)
• Terry McConnell’s MAT183 website from 2003 (note that the syllabus and emphases of the course have changed slightly since then)

Old links o’ the days

• a great page on input-output analysis (with cartoons!)
• The Monty Hall Paradox (aka the Marilyn vos Savant problem)
• The Parrondo Paradox
• a few more probability paradoxes (I especially like the envelope problem.)
• The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine [PDF] (Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s original paper describing the PageRank algorithm. Surprisingly readable.)
• The Use of the Linear Algebra by Web Search Engines [PDF] (again, surprisingly readable, and three cheers for linear algebra!)
• PageRank Uncovered [PDF] (a slightly slimy overview of PR, including tips for webmasters)
• The World’ s Largest Matrix Computation (Mathwise, this is the most heavy-duty of this set of links. It also makes the connection to Markov Chains, which we don’t have time to talk about but are awesome mathematics.)
• Is Powerball a mug’s game? (what is the expected value of playing?)
• Frequently asked questions about Powerball (including “Your odds are wrong!” and the reason why they’re not, plus explanations of the difference between cash jackpot and the annuity)
• just for fun: wanna see what a four-dimensional solid looks like? (flash)
• tutorial on the TI-83 TVM Solver
• Find your own! Google things like “interest compounded daily”.
• instructions for playing with normal distributions on your TI-83
• mean height, weight, and body mass index, US 1960—2002 [PDF] (Note: these tables give the “standard error”, rather than the “standard deviation”. Multiply by the square root of the sample size to get the std. dev.)
• histograms of binomial distributions (java applet) and another one
• the IQ bell curve (not an intelligence bell curve!)
• things with normal distributions: height, laser beam intensity, and so on.
• Some of what mathematicians do
• Expected value and standard deviation at the roulette table
• Two explanations of why we sometimes divide by N-1 and sometimes by N when computing standard deviations: one, two.
• Life expectancy (look! means and medians!)
• Bayesian email filtering
• A Plan for Spam, wherein Paul Graham of Yahoo! proposes using Bayesian filtering.
• mean and median income in Redmond, Washington
• Pascal’s Triangle
• 
• John Venn, 1834—1923.
• Augustus De Morgan, 1806—1871.
• “naive” set theory
• Could you pass 8th-grade math? Of course you could.
• Russell’s Paradox, or, why set theory isn’t as straightforward as you might think.
• counting poker hands and computing the probabilities. (This site uses combin(n,r) for what we’ve been calling C(n,r).)
• Queneau’s 100,000,000,000,000 Sonnets (problem: if we have 10 possibilities for each of the 14 lines in a sonnet, how many sonnets can we build?)
• Quarks to Quasars, Powers of 10
• the chart of faculty used in lecture on 14 Sept
• US population data (see page 8)
• HIV statistics from the CDC
• the ELISA HIV test and its accuracy
• the development of the hydrogen bomb
• Alex Rodriguez’s batting average
• calculate your probability of winning the lottery
• if you’re a little bit nerdy, you might look into using TiddlyWiki Student Edition to organize your class notes on your laptop.
• Want to learn a little queueing theory?

Handouts and class-related stuff

• math clinic hours
• textbook web site
• (IMPORTANT) Working with Systems of Equations on the TI-83 (thanks to Chase Brady)
• Difference equations on the TI-83
• Notes on the TI-83Plus (you may use this on tests and the Final Exam)
• the map of Lincoln used in lecture on 7 Sept

Other Useful Links

• Syracuse Math Department
• Mathematician of the Day
• Success in Mathematics (lots of great advice here)
• the most common errors in undergraduate math (I don’t agree with all of this, but it’s interesting.)
• Paul Dawkins’ notes on How to Study Math, including Studying For Exams, Taking Exams, and Learning From Your Errors.