MATH 471 - PROBABILITY
11:30-12:20 MWF, Keller 413
PRELIMINARY VERSION - SEE WEB SITE FOR UPDATES!
Text: Capinski and Zastawniak, Probability through Problems, Springer
Alternate suggested reading:
Prerequisites: Math 244 and 371; Math 311 would be useful. Or consent.
Professor: David Ross
319 PSB 956-4673 ross@math.hawaii.edu www.math.hawaii.edu/~ ross
Tentative office hours: M 12:30-3:00 and by appointment, these will likely change
Grades will be based on 3 criteria:
Policy on missed exams:
Make-up exams will only be given in very unusual circumstances, with one week prior notification (or, in the event of an emergency, *very* strong documentation of that emergency).
Attendance:
Mandatory, though I won't take regular roll. Only about 75% of the course material appears in the text, so you'll need to come to find out what we're doing and how we're doing it.
Material covered:
Most of the text, and some supplementary material. Topics include: Probability Spaces (both discrete and continuous), Random Variables, Expectation (and more general moments), Variance, Conditional Probability and Expectation, Inequalities, Limit theorems (Laws of Large Numbers, Central Limit Theorem), Classical Distributions, Moment-Generating and Characteristic functions
Policy on collaboration and cheating:
The distinction between working together (``collaboration") and copying from one another (``cheating") is a subtle one. Cheating on examinations will not be tolerated in this class. It is the student's responsibility to ensure that (s)he does not copy from another student, or let another student copy from him or her. This holds true for take-home as well as in-class exams. Because homework comprises a large fraction of the semester grade, collaboration there is discouraged as well. If two students genuinely work together on a problem, their written solution should be sufficiently different to make it clear that each understands the solution. One students should never give an answer to another, though hints as to a solution might be OK.