Chance, luck, and ignorance: how to put our uncertainty into numbers - David Spiegelhalter

We all have to live with uncertainty about what is going to happen, what has happened, and why things turned out how they did.  We attribute good and bad events as ‘due to chance’, label people as ‘lucky’, and (sometimes) admit our ignorance.  I will show how to use the theory of probability to take apart all these ideas, and demonstrate how you can put numbers on your ignorance, and then measure how good those numbers are. Along the way we will look at three types of luck, and judge whether Derren Brown was lucky or unlucky when he was filmed flipping ten Heads in a row.

David Spiegelhalter was Cambridge University's first Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk. He has appeared regularly on television and radio and is the author of several books, the latest of which is The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck (Penguin, September 2024).

Please email @email to register to attend in person.

The lecture will be broadcast on the Oxford Mathematics YouTube Channel on Wednesday 11 December at 5-6pm and any time after (no need to register for the online version).

The Oxford Mathematics Public Lectures are generously supported by XTX Markets.