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Probability is nothing but common sense reduced to calculation—Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749 - 1827)

Readings

• Notes, Chapter 5 (PDF)
• Huffmann, David A. "A Method for the Construction of Minimum-Redundancy Codes." Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers 40 (September 1952): 1098-1101.
• English Letter Usage Statistics (from "A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens)
• Towser's Wonderland Park greyhound handicaps, Boston Globe, February 27, 2005 (and results, Boston Globe, February 28, 2005)

Assignments

• Problem Set 4 (PDF)
• Problem Set 4 Solutions (PDF)

Resources

Technical

• Salomon, David. "Huffman Coding, section 2.8; Facsimile Compression using Huffman Coding, section 2.13." In Data Compression. London, England: Springer, 2006. ISBN: 9781846286025.
• The Human Mortality Database from University of California, Berkeley.
• MIT current year student enrollment data: Y chart (all students) . . . Women students
• Sebastiani, Paola. "A Tutorial on Probability Theory." One of many good tutorials on the subject. (PDF)^#

Historical

• David, F. N. Games, Gods and Gambling. London, England: Charles Griffen & Co., 1962 (Dover reprint 1998 in paperback). ISBN: 9780486400235.
• Girolamo Cardano (1501 - 1576), the first mathematician to calculate probabilities correctly.
• Thomas Bayes (1702 - 1761)
• David A. Huffman (1925 - 1999) obituary

General Technical Books

There are many excellent texts on probability, many of which do not assume a familiarity with mathematics beyond introductory calculus. Most books on communications include a summary of the necessary background in probability.

• Drake, Alvin W. Fundamentals of Applied Probability Theory. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1967. ISBN: 9780070178151.
  Prof. Drake taught 6.041 Probabilistic Systems Analysis for many years (he retired and then died Oct. 30, 2005. Obituary.)
• Bertsekas, Dimitri P., and John N. Tsitsiklis. Introduction to Probability. Belmont, MA: Athena Scientific, 2002. ISBN: 9781886529403. Used in 6.041 today.
• Applebaum, David. Probability and Information. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ISBN: 9780521727884.
  Chapter 4, Probability, contains a good comparison of the different philosophies underlying probability (symmetry, subjective, frequency)
• Haykin, Simon. Communication Systems. 4th ed. New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2000. ISBN: 9780471178699.
  Appendix 1, Probability Theory.

UNITS: Bits and Codes | Compression | Noise and Errors | Probability | Communications | Processes | Inference | Maximum Entropy | Physical Systems | Energy | Temperature | Quantum Information