1 Cars, Goats, and Sample Spaces.- 1.1 Getting your goat.- 1.2 Nutshell history and philosophy lesson.- 1.3 Let those dice roll. Sample spaces.- 1.4 Discrete sample spaces. Probability distributions and spaces.- 1.5 The car-goat problem solved.- 1.6 Exercises for Chapter 1.- 2 How to Count: Birthdays and Lotteries.- 2.1 Counting your birthdays.- 2.2 Following your dreams in Lottoland.- 2.3 Exercises for Chapter 2.- 3 Conditional Probability: From Kings to Prisoners.- 3.1 Some probability rules. Conditional Probability.- 3.2 Does the king have a sister?.- 3.3 The prisoner's dilemma.- 3.4 All about urns.- 3.5 Exercises for Chapter 3.- 4. The Formula of Thomas Bayes and Other Matters.- 4.1 On blood tests and Bayes's formula.- 4.2 An urn problem.- 4.3 Laplace's law of succession.- 4.4 Subjective probability.- 4.5 Questions of paternity.- 4.6 Exercises for Chapter 4.- 5 The Idea of Independence, with Applications.- 5.1 Independence of events.- 5.2 Waiting for the first head to show.- 5.3 On the likelihood of alien life.- 5.4 The monkey at the typewriter.- 5.5 Rare events do occur.- 5.6 Rare versus extraordinary events.- 5.7 Exercises for Chapter 5.- 6 A Little Bit About Games.- 6.1 The problem of points.- 6.2 Craps.- 6.3 Roulette.- 6.4 What are the odds?.- 6.5 Exercises for Chapter 6.- 7 Random Variables, Expectations, and More About Games.- 7.1 Random variables.- 7.2 The binomial random variable.- 7.3 The game of chuck-a-luck and de Mere's problem of dice.- 7.4 The expectation of a random variable.- 7.5 Fair and unfair games.- 7.6 Gambling systems.- 7.7 Administering a blood test.- 7.8 Exercises for Chapter 7.- 8 Baseball Cards, The Law of Large Numbers, and Bad News for Gamblers.- 8.1 The coupon collector's problem.- 8.2 Indicator variables and the expectation of a binomial variable.- 8.3 Independent random variables.- 8.4 The coupon collector's problem solved.- 8.5 The Law of Large Numbers.- 8.6 The Law of Large Numbers and gambling.- 8.7 A gambler's fallacy.- 8.8 The variance of a random variable.- 8.8.1 Appendix.- 8.8.2 The variance of the sum of independent random variables.- 8.8.3 The variance ofSn/n.- 8.9 Exercises for Chapter 8.- 9 From Traffic to Chocolate Chip Cookies with the Poisson Distribution.- 9.1 A traffic problem.- 9.2 The Poisson as an approximation to the binomial.- 9.3 Applications of the Poisson distribution.- 9.4 The Poisson process.- 9.5 Exercises for Chapter 9.- 10 The Desperate Case of the Gambler's Ruin.- 10.1 Let's go for a random walk.- 10.2 The gambler's ruin problem.- 10.3 Bold play or timid play?.- 10.4 Exercises for Chapter 10.- 11 Breaking Sticks, Tossing Needles, and More: Probability on Continuous Sample Spaces.- 11.1 Choosing a number at random from an interval.- 11.2 Bus stop.- 11.3 The expectation of a continuous random variable.- 11.4 Normal numbers.- 11.5 Bertrand's paradox.- 11.6 When do we have a triangle?.- 11.7 Buffon's needle problem.- 11.8 Exercises for Chapter 11.- 12 Normal Distributions, and Order from Diversity via the Central Limit Theorem.- 12.1 Making sense of some data.- 12.2 The normal distributions.- 12.3 Some pleasant properties of normal distributions.- 12.4 The Central Limit Theorem.- 12.5 How many heads did you get?.- 12.6 Why so many quantities may be approximately normal.- 12.7 Exercises for Chapter 12.- 13 Random Numbers: What They Are and How to Use Them.- 13.1 What are random numbers?.- 13.2 When are digits random? Statistical randomness.- 13.3 Pseudo-random numbers.- 13.4 Random sequences arising from decimal expansions.- 13.5 The use of random numbers.- 13.6 The 1970 draft lottery.- 13.7 Exercises for Chapter 13.- 14 Computers and Probability.- 14.1 A little bit about computers.- 14.2 Frequency of zeros in a random sequence.- 14.3 Simulation of tossing a coin.- 14.4 Simulation of rolling a pair of dice.- 14.5 Simulation of the Buffon needle tosses.- 14.6 Monte Carlo estimate of ? using bombardment of a circle.- 14.7 Monte Carlo estimate for the broken stick problem.- 14.8 Monte Carlo estimate of a binomial probability.- 14.9 Monte Carlo estimate of the probability of winning at craps.- 14.10 Monte Carlo estimate of the gambler's ruin probability.- 14.11 Constructing approximately normal random variables.- 14.12 Exercises for Chapter 14.- 15 Statistics: Applying Probability to Make Decisions.- 15.1 What statistics does.- 15.2 Lying with statistics?.- 15.3 Deciding between two probabilities.- 15.4 More complicated decisions.- 15.5 How many fish in the lake, and other problems of estimation.- 15.6 Polls and confidence intervals.- 15.7 Random sampling.- 15.8 Some concluding remarks.- 15.9 Exercises for Chapter 15.- 16 Roaming the Number Line with a Markov Chain: Dependence.- 16.1 A picnic in Alphaville?.- 16.2 One-dimensional random walks.- 16.3 The probability of ever returning home.- 16.4 About the gambler recouping her losses.- 16.5 The dying out of family names.- 16.6 The number of parties waiting for a taxi.- 16.7 Stationary distributions.- 16.8 Applications to genetics.- 16.9 Exercises for Chapter 16.- 17 The Brownian Motion, and Other Processes in Continuous Time.- 17.1 Processes in continuous time.- 17.2 A few computations for the Poisson process.- 17.3 The Brownian motion process.- 17.4 A few computations for Brownian motion.- 17.5 Brownian motion as a limit of random walks.- 17.6 Exercises for Chapter 17.- Answers to Exercises.