Math 110.107, Calculus II (Biological and Social Sciences)

Fall 2010 Course Lecture Synopses

 

Week 12:  November 15 through November 19

 

http://www.mathematics.jhu.edu/brown/courses/f10/107.htm

 

 

Dr. Richard Brown

MWF 10:00am - 10:50am Krieger 205

[email protected]

 

403 Krieger Hall

 

410-516-8179

 

Office Hours:

 

M

1:00-2:00 pm

by appt. other times

W

1:00-2:00 pm

 

Below is some basic information pertaining to the lectures of this course.  I will update this page after each lecture or two to benefit both the students in their attempts to organize the material for the course, and the TAs so that they know what material I covered and how it was covered.  Please direct any comments about this page to me at the above contact information. 

 

·       Monday, November 15:  Here, I continued the discussion of chapter 12 but venturing into Section 12.2.  I started with a definition of a random experiment, and a sample space, and an event, again using examples for motivation.  We played with common set notation to explore how to create complicated events (subsets of the sample space) from unions, intersections and complements of simply events.  I then reviewed De Morgan’s Laws.  I discussed when two events are disjoint, (and when many events are pairwise disjoint), and defined what is a probability.  Really, given any finite set  (the sample space), a probability is really only as functional assignment  that satisfies three properties:  (1) for any event ,  (its image under the probability function is in the unit interval), (2) , and , and (3) for any two disjoint events,  and , .  Really, any assignment that satisfies these tenets is a probability.  I gave some examples, and discussed two consequences:  (1) For any event , , and (2) For any two (not necessarily disjoint) events  and , . The only thing to remember for the last one is that two simply add the probabilities, one would be including the outcomes in both events twice.  The last term is a way to fix that.  Assuming that any of the outcomes in a sample space  are equally likely to occur, one can than easily calculate the probability of any outcome, and then any event:  , where  is the number of outcomes in the event .  I then ventured into the notion of Conditional Probability, a way to calculate the probability of an event occurring when it is already known that another event has occurred.  In essence, when an event  occurs, how does that change the probability that a second event can occur.  When they are related, it can change a lot.  I talked about how this works, and developed the equation to calculate the conditional probability that event  occurs given that event  has occurred:  .  Essentially, if event  has occurred, then the sample space is now limited to .  The only outcomes left in  are the ones that are also in .  That is the top of the fraction.  The bottom is to address the idea that the space of available outcomes is not only .  For equally likely outcomes in , we get   .

·       Wednesday, November 17:

·      Friday, November 19: