Study Aids and Handouts
- Chapter 3 in the book starts with the statement that there are two different "philosophies" in the field of probability theory and statistics: Frequentist and Bayesian. The book of course cannot delve into this in any greater detail, and hence the distinction might remain a bit mysterious. If you want to learn more about this, an interesting point to start might be the first 40 minutes of a talk by Michael Jordan, which you can find here. Especially illuminating are the three slides entitled "Decision-Theoretic Perspective". Another interesting source is the article by Bradley Efron entitled "Modern Science and the Bayesian-Frequentist Controversy", which—just like the talk by Jordan—takes a pleasingly synthetic point of view.
- A folding net to create your own set of Efron's dice can be downloaded here.
- Here are some sample questions in preparation for the first midterm exam!
- Problem 20 claimed—without proof—that the characteristic function of the Gaussian distribution is also a Gaussian. If you are curious how this comes about, here's a derivation of this result.
- Here are some sample questions in preparation for the second midterm exam!
- As promised, here's the Mathematica code that helps you play with the van der Waals free energy.
- And here's the pdf that discussed the van der Waals phase transition, and the relation between F(T,V,N) and G(T,P,N).
- Here are some sample questions in preparation for the final exam! Notice that these are only post-midterm-2-questions.
