The Improbability Principle

The Improbability Principle – David J. Hand

Someone wins the lottery twice. Lightning strikes the same person more than once. You think of an old friend and the phone rings with a call from them. Events like these seem so unlikely that many people see them as signs of fate, luck or something supernatural. But are they really so surprising?

In The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day, David J. Hand, emeritus professor of mathematics at Imperial College London and a former president of the Royal Statistical Society, explains why extremely improbable events are actually commonplace.

Hand sets out a series of principles that together form the improbability principle. These include the law of inevitability, which states that something must happen; the law of truly large numbers, which shows that with enough opportunities, even the most unlikely events become likely; the law of selection, which explains how we notice remarkable events after the fact; the law of the probability lever, which shows how small changes in circumstances can dramatically change probabilities; and the law of near enough, which reveals how we often treat similar events as identical.

Using examples from gambling, finance, science, sport, nature and everyday life, Hand shows how these principles explain coincidences and rare events without the need for mysterious forces.

Clear, entertaining and illuminating, The Improbability Principle is an excellent read for anyone interested in mathematics, statistics, probability and the surprising ways chance shapes our lives.