Chance, Chaos & Information
What can be said about a system nobody can predict — from a jittering pollen grain to the bell curve, the limits of forecasting, and the arithmetic of uncertainty itself.
7 articles
- 1Physics9 min
Brownian Motion
How the jittery path of a pollen grain became the mathematical foundation of diffusion, drug delivery, and molecular biology.
- 2Mathematics8 min
The Central Limit Theorem
The theorem that explains why the bell curve appears everywhere from exam scores to measurement errors.
- 3Mathematics9 min
Bayes' Theorem
The rule for updating belief in the face of evidence, and why ignoring the base rate makes accurate tests wildly misleading.
- 4Mathematics10 min
Markov Chains
How a process that remembers only where it is right now can settle into a stable long-run distribution — the idea behind PageRank, MCMC, and text generation.
- 5Mathematics10 min
Chaos and Strange Attractors
How a rounding error in a weather simulation revealed that deterministic systems can be unpredictable in principle — and why that caps forecasting at about two weeks.
- 6Mathematics10 min
Information Theory
Shannon entropy counts the yes/no questions you need to pin down an unknown. That count turns out to be the exact limit of lossless compression, and the reason error correction has a price.
- 7Mathematics10 min
Game Theory and the Nash Equilibrium
How a single fixed-point idea — nobody can improve by changing their mind alone — explains cartels, auctions, arms races, and why cooperation still manages to survive.