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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rabinowitz, Larry, 1937
Elementary probability with applications / Larry Rabinowitz.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Probabilities. I. Title.

QA273.R16 2004
519.2--dc22 2004051556

09 08 07 06 05 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In the nineteenth century, mathematicians attacked pi with the help of human computers. The most powerful of these was Johann Martin Zacharias Dase, a prodigy from Hamburg. Dase could multiply large numbers in his head, and he made a living exhibiting himself to crowds in Germany, Denmark, and England, and hiring himself out to mathematicians. A mathematician once asked Dase to multiply 79,532,853 by 93,758,479, and Dase gave the right answer in fifty-four seconds. Dase extracted the square root of a hundred-digit number in fifty-two minutes, and he was able to multiply a couple of hundred-digit numbers in his head during a period of eight and three-quarters hours. Dase could do this kind of thing for weeks on end, running as an unattended supercomputer. He would break off...