Magnificent. I can't explain why I'm so delighted by this, but the mental image makes me happy.
She must have been instantly smitten, what a charmer.
(*) Okay, not a 1980s-level computer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie
)
So about an 8% chance. You’re significantly more likely (ie 92% chance) to see _something else_. And that’s _the most_ likely outcome.
So tldr - it’s not so much that “you never see an all tails sequence in practice” - you’re actually unlikely to see any particular sequence. All the probabilities get astonishingly low very quickly.
I think von Neumann would understand some basic probability already by then.
Or maybe not? But at least there is a non-zero probability that it did not happen like that.
Sounds like his losses were a good investment.
Family wealth is often ignored in various scientists' biographies. It makes it easier to do science without the pressures of having to think about where the next cheque is going to come from.
I always smirk when reminded that anti-capitalist Karl Marx never held a job but was always funded by his family-money rich bourgeoisie friend, and married a rich Scotland royal decendant
> During this time she also wrote the code for the first computer simulation of the Monte Carlo method, which is a method to store and analyze large quantities of data and make predictions on everything from elections to COVID-19 trend forecasting.
In a similar fashion Vincent Ford, who was the Air Force colonel responsible for von Neumann when he was in hospital dying of cancer, published a manuscript, Twenty-Four Minutes To Checkmate, on the US crash program for ICBMs focusing on the 1953-1957 period, which obviously overlaps a lot with when von Neumann was involved in those topics. It's held in the Dwight Eisenhower Library in Kansas however it's also only available if you visit in person.
It would be a great boost to the history of science if both texts were either published or scanned and uploaded online to make them significantly more accessible to both scholars and interested laypersons.
* My memory is really fuzzy on this, but IIRC they had 1-2" holes in sheets that would either be transparent or black. Looking back they may have had some sort optical setup to read raw binary. I've never run into this since then (never really looked for it though either). She may have worked at IBM. I'd be interested if anyone knew what I was talking about.
The technical report on the ENIAC is an awesome read.
now that's impressive.
