Steve, Monty, and Julia

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] I don’t make a habit of reading obituaries, but I’m glad I clicked the link to this one in yesterday’s New York Times (that should be a gift link). Steve Selvin was a statistician who got his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, and taught there for many years. He got into the Times because of a probability puzzle he came up with in 1975: the Monty Hall Problem. I won’t explain the problem here. Most of you already know it, and those who don’t can read the setup in the Wikipedia article. I do want to praise the Times for the cute little interactive game they included in Selvin’s obituary. It allows you to be a Let’s Make a Deal contestant and run through the problem again and again (with your computer playing the Monty Hall role) until you’re convinced that the “switching my choice” strategy is distinctly better than the “sticking…

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