Chance News (July-August 2005)

Under construction. See Chance News (May-June 2005) for additional recent chance news.

Numbers are like people; torture them enough and they'll tell you anything.

• Forsooth (July-August 2005)
• Å probability problem

Here is a nice probability question that one of our students asked us to solve.

QUESTION: We start with n ropes and gather their 2n ends together.

Then we randomly pair the ends and make n joins. Let E(n) be the

expected number of loops. What is E(n)?

If you happen to know a reference for this problem please mention this in the discussion page for this chance news.