MATHEMATICS E-102, FALL 2005 SETS, COUNTING, AND PROBABILITY Assignment #1 EP means Stirzaker, Elementary Probability Problems to be handed

in at class on Tuesday, Sept. 27: This assignment is intended to be short and simple. Try it before Friday. If you cannot do most of it, this course is likely to be too hard for you. If you nd it too easy, dont worry there will be plenty of challenges later! 1. (a) What is the probability of rolling 5 with two fair dice? (b) Suppose that a craps player has rolled a 5 and now makes a $2 odds bet. If she next rolls 5, she wins y. If she next rolls 7, she loses and get nothing back. Otherwise her $2 is refunded. What is the fair value for y? 2. Draw a Venn diagram to illustrate each of de Morgans identities (a) (A B)c = Ac B c (b) (A B)c = Ac B c 3. EP, page 49, problem 7. This is to encourage you to rush to the Coop and buy the book, but just in case, here it is.... Let A, B, and C be events. Write down expressions for the events where (a) At least two of A, B, C occur. (b) Exactly two of A, B, C occur. (c) At most two of A, B, C occur. (d) Exactly one of A, B, C occurs. 4. A young congressman has just been made a committee chairman. He hopes to demonstrate his administrative talent by dividing up the committee into two or three subcommittees of equal size. Let A be the event that the committee can be evenly divided into two subcommittees. Let B be the event that the committee can be evenly divided into three subcommittees. The number of members on the committee, determined randomly, is equally likely to be any of the 11 integers between 10 and 20 inclusive. Determine by simple counting the probabilities P(A), P(B), P(AB), and P(A B), and show that they satisfy the inclusion-exclusion formula (7 on p. 35 of EP).

5. (a) Using the properties of probability functions on page 35 of EP, and given the inclusion-exclusion formula P(A B) = P(A) + P(B) P(A B), prove that P(A B) P(A) + P(B). (b) Prove by induction that for a nite number of events A1 , A2 ...An , P(A1 A2 ... An ) P(A1 ) + P(A2 ) + ... + P(An ). (If you are unfamiliar with proofs by induction, what this means is Show that the statement is true for the base case n = 2. Make the inductive hypothesis that the statement is true for the case n and use this to show that the statement is true for the case n + 1. This proves the statement for any integer n 2.) 6. A baseball team is required to make four pitchers and six non-pitchers available for an expansion draft. From this pool of 10 players the league selects two, with each player equally likely to be chosen rst and each of the nine remaining players equally likely to be chosen second. Let A be the event that the rst player chosen is a pitcher (and the second can be anything). Let B be the event that the second player chosen is a pitcher (and the rst can have been anything). The manager wants to know the probability that at least one pitcher will be chosen. Show that you get 2 the same answer, 3 , by each of the following approaches. Illustrate with a Venn diagram the reasoning behind each of the four approaches. (a) P(A B) = 1 P(Ac B c ) (b) P(A B) = P(A) + P(B) P(A B) (c) P(A B) = P(A) + P(Ac B) (d) P(A B) = P(A B c ) + P(Ac B) + P(A B)