Know the Odds in Games of Chance

December 22, 2010 

At Emory University, in Atlanta, mathematician Ron Gould uses games of chance to teach students theories of mathematics. In fact, his "Mathematics in Games, Sport and Gambling" class is the most popular freshman seminar on the campus.

"I try to show them a wide variety of applications of various kinds of mathematics, probability, statistics, discrete mathematics, sometimes a little algebra, the things that they don’t expect to see," Gould said.

For instance, call a three-flip sequence in a coin tossing and "You are only going to win one-eighth of the time," says Gould. "They’re randomly picking a sequence and I'm able to react to that sequence and pick something that we can actually show has a better chance of happening."

Gould's students learn that in most games, the odds are against you before you even start.

"The probabilities do come into play and it’s not quite as random as you think it would be," says graduate student Susan Janiszewski.

Graduate student Kevin Wingfield notes, "You can figure out mathematically, using mathematics, that you are not supposed to win this game in the long run, so maybe I will get lucky and I'll win, but in the long run I'm not supposed to win.

"Most games of chance aren’t really games of chance," Gould concludes.

The Mathematical Association of America and the American Mathematical Society contributed to the TV portion of this report.

Source: Science Discoveries + Breakthroughs (December 2010)