Discrete Probability (Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics) 1st Edition by Hugh Gordon (PDF)

Description

Intended as a first course in probability at post-calculus level, this book is of special interest to students majoring in computer science as well as in mathematics. Since calculus is used only occasionally in the text, students who have forgotten their calculus can nevertheless easily understand the book, and its slow, gentle style and clear exposition will also appeal. Basic concepts such as counting, independence, conditional probability, random variables, approximation of probabilities, generating functions, random walks and Markov chains are all clearly explained and backed by many worked exercises. The 1,196 numerical answers to the 405 exercises, many with multiple parts, are included at the end of the book, and throughout, there are various historical comments on the study of probability. These include biographical information on such famous contributors as Fermat, Pascal, the Bernoullis, DeMoivre, Bayes, Laplace, Poisson, and Markov. Of interest to a wide range of readers and useful in many undergraduate programs.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I was forced to get this book for a class; otherwise, I wouldn’t have bought something with bad reviews. The thing is, some of the previous reviewers don’t like this book because it’s “written like a novel.” And I completely agree. It IS written like a novel. However, after some thinking, I have come to the conclusion that this is probably the best way to get the ideas across. Discrete probability would be EXTREMELY hard to understand without being wordy! This is not your regular algebra or analysis book.I took off a star because there are many typos. I did find an errata sheet, but that was really hard to do. The author has passed away, and it’s not a famous enough book to elicit reprinting, so that’s definitely annoying. But give this book a chance. You might like the different approach to learning math in this book.

⭐I purchased this book for a course in probability and it was pretty good. The chapters and examples were well written, interesting, and applicable. The problem sets were good even though there were some issues with the solutions. Overall, this is one of the few books that I kept from college.

⭐Great book!! Easy read in plain and simple english.The reviews criticizing the book for being written as a novel are misguided.I’ve looked at a lot of probability books. From the pure math (axiomatic) point of viewto the applied point of view. This book in my opinion sets the stagefor a more abstract level approach.(Also the ideas of Discrete Probability can be easily generalized.)It clearly explains the differencebetween concepts (ie. using your brain) and technical formulas.”Faced with a problem, we try to look at it from several points of viewuntil a solution becomes obvious. Sometimes, but not always, a formula is useful….. Using the formula is a minor task, …, much of the time no formula isavailable… a formula should never replace thinking.” Chapter 2.con: Has a few typos.

⭐This review is based on having read through the first chapter and scanned the rest of the book. This book fills the intended purpose. I needed a better understanding of discrete probability in order to better understand cryptography material that I’m studying. As you might guess, there’s not a large number of books available on this subject (i.e.discrete probability). The Hugh Gordon book is the only one I’ve been studying — my other intro to discrete probability was a blog recommended by a Stanford professor. I’ve got to say the book is much easier to follow than the blog.

⭐I’m writing this review based on my recollection of reading the book a few years ago, when i took the course “Introduction to Probability” at the Tel-Aviv university. This was not the official course book. As anyone who’s studied Math or CS at TAU knows, courses never have official books, unless the instructor happens to have written it him-/herself. From a pedagogical point of view, TAU is an embarrassment to higher education institutes. But i digress.This is the only book i could find that focuses almost entirely on discrete probability (the Poisson distribution is touched upon, and maybe some other continuous distributions as well, but only marginally). It does an excellent job at presenting the material, especially the powerful tool of indicator variables.Coupled with Carol Ash’s “The Probability Tutoring Book”, Uri Lieberman’s “Introduction to Probability Theory” (Hebrew) and especially Amir Beck’s excellent “Introduction to Probability: A Collection of Solved Exercises” (Hebrew), i managed to successfully complete this course.If you’re about to take an introductory Probability course, keep in mind the following two rules of thumb:1. Any result obtained using a countably infinite sample space can always be obtained by taking a limit over gradually increasing finite sample spaces.2. Any finite, rational-valued distribution, can be modeled as a uniform distribution over a finite sample space.

⭐SUNY Albany? I think the only reason this book was used is because it was published by some professor who taught there. What a stupid mistake.This is the worst book to learn probability from. It isn’t even a math book when there are more words than there is math. Don’t enroll in any class that uses this book because chances are the professor will teach directly from this book and you’ll probably be lost through the whole course. The derivation of certain formulas are unclear and my professor does a poor job explaining the formulas as well. There are mistakes in the math and grammatical mistakes in the text. I don’t need to learn the history of mathematicians but for some reason the author feels obliged to put it in there. There are no worked-out exercises because the whole book is structured like a long boring novel. Some times the math explaining a formula is embedded between the texts of a paragraph. If you’re enrolled in a class that requires this book, save yourself some trouble and transfer classes or drop it entirely.

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