Interesting maths for a talk I'm giving

djk1000

Hey,

So I've been roped into giving a talk to people on my team in work. It's an IT services company and everyone takes a turn to give a talk on a relevant subject. I'm doing an introduction to data analytics and I want to keep it interesting. Does anyone have any suggestions of fairly simple things that I can explain and then relate to practical applications?

An example of what I'm looking for would be Benford's law and the (often) predictable distribution of first digits in a data set. It has an interesting story of how Benford came up with it, it's easy to explain and I can relate it to the real world if I talk about its use in fraud detection.

Hopefully this is the right forum to ask! I'd love to get at least some of the audience interested in this kind of thing.

Thanks,

D

Yakuza

The birthday problem / paradox might be a good one to use - how you can get a surprisingly high chance of sharing a birthday in a room with a relatively small group of people.

TheBody

Maybe the Monty hall problem? Nice video on it here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhlc7peGlGg

hypersonic

photo stacking in astronomy its nice and visual and can be used to describe noise/information etc.

Ostrom

From Ben Goldacre, always good for a laugh

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/16/bad-science-dodgy-stats

There is a book which gives a brief history of Fischer's early experiments with distributions - http://www.amazon.com/The-Lady-Tasting-Tea-Revolutionized/dp/0805071342