Courses
GCNU1005 Beating the Odds (3 units)
- Medium of Instruction:
- English
This course begins with a list of well-selected and counterintuitive examples to help students become aware of the existence of mathematics in every aspect of our lives. Chance plays a huge part in life; one will have a better management of risk and opportunities and hence higher odds to become a winner in life if he knows more about how probability works. Rather than focusing on calculating a few specific combinations or permutations, which are tiresome and tedious to most, this course uses real-life situations as incentives and utilizes mathematics as a tool to figure out the “Best Bet” in some everyday problems. Casinos and games are topics commonly seen in probability; after equipping students with the knowledge necessary for identifying the “Best Bet”, we move on to a very practical problem—knowing that the chance of winning is 99.9%, how much should we invest on this “Best Bet”? Our investigations (not the formulas and calculations) are then extended to cover more real-life situations in which its odds cannot be predicted by counting techniques. Students will discover new ways of expressing known information, connecting reality to math, applying meta-tools to predict chances, and making statistically-justifiable decisions.
http://ge.hkbu.edu.hk/course/GCNU-1005/