1 May 2009
Congratulations to Keith Parramore who has been appointed the Royal Statistical Society's Guy lecturer for 2009.
Keith will be delivering his Guy lecture, "The bottle factory - order from chaos", at a number of schools around the country during his tenure as the Guy lecturer, investigating with what is meant by "random selection".
What does "random" mean? Chaotic? "Pernicious"? Is random selection fair or do we empathise with the following quotation, heard on Radio 4? "Well, fairer in the sense that everyone's got an equal chance, but not fair in the sense that, well, it is literally a lottery".
Here's another quotation from Radio 4, from 'Material World', in which an 'expert' was trying to justify the need for the enormous computing power available from networked super computers: "We build mathematical models and then (need to) throw trillions of numbers at them". What is this all about?
In the lecture, Keith examines and develops the concept of randomness and then uses random numbers to drive a simulation to solve an industrial problem.
Participants who have calculators which will generate random numbers should bring them along, but it doesn't matter if they don't have them.
