Math Colloquium: Prof. Lara Pudwell

Prof. Lara Pudwell will speak in math colloquium on Friday, January 27.  Her title and abstract are below.

Colloquium meets at 3:30 p.m. in GEM 120.  All are welcome, whether you’re registered for colloquium or not.

Title: What’s in your wallet?!
Abstract: You may associate this title with credit card commercials, but it is also an invitation to some interesting probabilistic mathematics. A Markov chain is a model for analyzing the probability of a sequence of events where each event only depends on the result of the previous event. In this talk, we will introduce background on Markov chains in general and use them to answer the particular question “what is the most likely distribution of coins to have in your wallet?”