My Reflection on the Math History Curricular Connections Assignment

As a student of the statistics discipline, I was astounded by the amount of history which lies within the topic of probability theory alone. In fact, everything I have presented on 5 slides was only a small subset of techniques used in modern generalized linear regression models. It was also surprising how many mathematicians reached the same conclusions on this subject. This further enforces my perception that many theorems are categorized as 'necessary' instead of 'arbitrary'. Moreover, when researching the origins of each contribution, I was surprised at how many probability theories were discovered when working on applications of astronomy or finance. While many math concepts are discovered from inspirations and artistic expressions, it was nice to see that there can also be discoveries through supporting applications of real-world problems.

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  1. Susan GerofskyNovember 30, 2024 at 3:32 PM

    Thanks Ray! I'm so glad you could work with this topic that is close to the work you've done in actuarial science. I find it surprising too that astronomy as well as finance have given people opportunities to contemplate probability. Good slides and reflections, and too bad there wasn't quite enough time for people to actually try the interactive activity -- something that would have gotten everyone into the topic with (probably) a lot of passionate opinions on the question!

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