Professor Oliver Johnson

This is the web page for first half of the Level 1 course 'Probability and Statistics' lectured by Professor Oliver Johnson of the School of Mathematics of Bristol University.

Lectures take place throughout teaching block 1 apart from Reading Week (Week 6).

Lectures: 2pm Mondays, 9am Tuesdays Priory LT

Problem classes alternate weeks: 4pm Friday Priory LT

Optional drop-in sessions: 11am Tuesdays, G83 Fry Building or send me an email to try to fix a meeting at other times.

A more detailed description of the course including syllabus, suggested reading and unit aims.

There will be two assessed quizzes counting for 5% credit, deadlines midday Friday 21st October and 18th November

Lecture notes (with Corrections)

This material is copyright of the University of Bristol unless explicitly stated otherwise. It is provided exclusively for educational purposes at the University and is to be downloaded or copied for your private study only.

A First Course in Probability by S. Ross.

Lecture 1: Humans are not good at generating random numbers

Lecture 2: Ramsey's theorem (see also Quanta magazine)

Lecture 3: MIT Blackjack Team

Lecture 4: Lateral flow test positivity - see also (Conditional) Probability is likely to confuse people

Lecture 5: German tank problem

Lecture 6: 10 pin bowling

Class 2: Beating roulette

Lecture 7: Fermi estimation

Lecture 8: Drake equation

Lecture 9: Double your money?

Lecture 10: Infinite Jest tennis match

Class 3: Fighting a truel

Lecture 11: US election special FiveThirtyEight

Lecture 12: Spurious correlations

Class 4: Benford's Law: Testing Benford's law

Lecture 13: Probabilistic method

Lecture 14: Risk win probabilities

Lecture 15: Alan Turing and probability

Lecture 16: Taskmaster donut game

Class 5: Larry Summers

Lecture 17: Random walks and electrical networks

Lecture 18: Metcheck snow probabilities, Bank of England inflation predictions, climate change scenarios

Lecture 19: Patronising advice on how to revise

Lecture 20: Quincunx