Thursday 13 March, 6pm at the Royal Statistical Society

The Improbability Principle

Professor David Hand will talk about his new book which will just have been released.

The Improbability Principle is about extraordinarily improbable events. It’s about events which are so unlikely that we wouldn’t expect to see them during our entire lifetimes - or even the lifetime of the human race or the universe itself. And it’s about why, despite all that, we do see such events; and more, it’s about why we them again and again.

The improbability principle is formulated as a set of laws. Like Newton’s three laws of motion or the four laws of thermodynamics the laws are based on sound scientific reasoning. They explain what it is about the universe which leads to the occurrence of the improbable, the unexpected, and the extraordinary.

Taken alone, any one of the laws can result in the occurrence of events which ought to be so rare that we never see them happen. Taken together they intertwine to make extraordinarily improbable events commonplace.

This book shows, illustrating with many real-life examples, how the five basic laws constituting the improbability principle conspire to make the highly unexpected happen again and again.

Paul Gentry
Meetings & Conferences Manager

The Royal Statistical Society

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Data | Evidence | Decisions

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