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"In no other branch of mathematics is it so easy for experts to blunder as in probability theory."įirst presented in a letter to the editor of The American Statistician in 1975, the Monty Hall Problem was also counterintuitive. “ a wonderfully confusing little problem," its creator, Scientific American columnist Martin Gardner, later wrote, smugly. Bertrand, who concluded that the probability was ⅔, was lauded for his ability to look beyond the obvious.Ī second iteration of this paradox, the Three Prisoners Problem (1959), presents a statistically identical scenario, with the same outcome. Assuming the participant draws one gold coin from a box, the problem then asks what the probability is that the other coin in that box is gold.
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In Joseph Bertrand’s box paradox (1889), three boxes are presented - one containing two gold coins, one containing two silver coins, and the final containing one of each. Historically, the Monty Hall Problem was predated by several very similar puzzles. For decades, it has sparked intense debates in classrooms and lecture halls.
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Despite its deceptive simplicity, some of the world’s brightest minds - MIT professors, renowned mathematicians, and MacArthur “Genius” Fellows - have had trouble grasping its answer. Loosely based on the famous television game show Let’s Make a Deal, the scenario presented above, better known as the “Monty Hall Problem,” is a rather famous probability question. Statistically, which choice gets you the car: keeping your original door, or switching? If you, like most people, posit that your odds are 50-50, you’re wrong - unless, of course, you like goats as much as you like new cars, in which case you'll win 100% of the time. “Now,” he says, turning toward you, “do you want to keep door #1, or do you want to switch to door #2?” Then, the host, who is well-aware of what’s going on behind the scenes, opens door #3, revealing one of the goats. The host implores you to pick a door, and you select door #1. Behind one of them, sits a sparkling, brand-new Lincoln Continental behind the other two, are smelly old goats. Imagine that you’re on a television game show and the host presents you with three closed doors. What ensued for vos Savant was a nightmarish journey, rife with name-calling, gender-based assumptions, and academic persecution. When vos Savant politely responded to a reader’s inquiry on the Monty Hall Problem, a then-relatively-unknown probability puzzle, she never could’ve imagined what would unfold: though her answer was correct, she received over 10,000 letters, many from noted scholars and Ph.Ds, informing her that she was a hare-brained idiot. It was in the body of one of these columns that vos Savant ignited one of the most heated statistical battles of the 21st century. Shortly thereafter, she established “Ask Marilyn,” a now-famous weekly column in which she answered (and continues to answer, to this day) a variety of academic questions and logic puzzles.
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Here, she caught a break: when Parade Magazine wrote a profile on her, readers responded with so many letters that the publication offered her a full-time job.
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In the mid-1980s, with free rein to choose a career path, she packed her bags and moved to New York City to be a writer. She went on to be listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the “World’s Highest IQ,” and, as a result, gained international fame.ĭespite her status as the "world’s smartest woman,” vos Savant maintained that attempts to measure intelligence were “useless,” and she rejected IQ tests as unreliable. At age 10, she was given two intelligence tests - the Stanford-Binet, and the Mega Test - both of which placed her mental capacity at that of a 23-year-old. Louis, Missouri in 1946, the young savant quickly developed an aptitude for math and science. By all accounts, Marilyn vos Savant was a child prodigy.īorn in St.