Gordon Weinberg
Adjunct Instructor
University of Pittsburgh
(412) 624-8368
gordonw@pitt.edu









For Spring 2008 Pitt Stat, use one of the following two links:






U. Pitt Spring 2008 Intro Statistics Course Offerings





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Some Math in the News

  1. Math Mistakes Kill
    Nurses fail to realize they're giving wrong dosages.

  2. Computing Errors Cause Disasters
    Roundoff error killed 28 U.S. soldiers in the first Gulf War, overflow error caused the destruction of a 7.5 billion dollar European space rocket, and lack of careful computer modeling sank a 90,000 ton offshore oil rig.

  3. Wrong Unit Conversion causes disaster
    Misunderstood units caused loss of the Mars Orbiter.

  4. Pure math saves money
    "In the highly successful 1994 United States FCC auction of broadcast frequency wavelengths, experts in mathematical game theory had been consulted to carefully design the auction to maximize both the payoff for the government as well as the utility of the purchased wavelengths for buyers. By contrast, a similar New Zealand auction held without such careful attention to design resulted in the government realizing only 15% of the potential earnings, while the wavelengths were not efficiently distributed (in one case, a student bought a TV license for one dollar!)."
                --source: Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Vol. 45, number 10, 1998, p. 1331, paraphrasing from "A Beautiful Mind: A Biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr." by Sylvia Nasar.


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Last updated 28 August 2007 by Gordon Weinberg.
All information subject to change without appearance here.

This page: http://www.pitt.edu/~gordonw/

Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations
expressed in this material are those of the author
and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Pittsburgh.