Probability is full of surprises and paradoxes, most of which result from doing the calculation incorrectly. We will illustrate this using some familiar old stories and new ones: the Monty Hall problem, cognitive dissonance in monkeys, the birthday problem, lottery coincidences, the sad story of Sally Clark, the 2016 election, and gerrymandering in North Carolina.
Richard Timothy Durrett is a mathematician known for his research and books on mathematical probability theory, stochastic processes and their application to mathematical ecology and population genetics. He received his BS and MS at Emory University in 1972 and 1973 and his Ph.D. at Stanford University in 1976. He has taught at UCLA and Cornell University and currently teaches at Duke University. He was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2007 and became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012.