Have you ever won five games in a row and felt like you could win ten more? Or maybe you lost 5 five and you just kept losing after that? Most people that have played sports will recognize this. Being “in form” seems to have a large impact on whether we will win the...
How Netflix chooses which movie you watch next.
Different Home pages? We have all been there, scrolling through the Netflix home page while not being able to decide what movie or series to watch. Some movies seem interesting, but not enough to really dedicate your night to them. It is certainly a common issue that...
Bayesian Statistical Inference
Statistical inference is the use of data analysis to say something about the probability distribution of the underlying data. A very common tool to say something about the likely distribution of data is the method of maximum likelihood. Here we make an assumption of...
Are we alone in the Universe?
Since the beginning of civilization, humans have looked up into the sky and wondered whether we are alone in the Universe. Since then our technology has come quite a way and it feels like we can make a better-educated guess to this question. We currently estimate that...
Getting Featured on TikTok’s ‘For You’ Page
You have probably heard of it: TikTok. The widely popular app that came to existence after the acquisition of the video startup Musical.ly by the Chinese company ByteDance. Today, the app is used by almost 1.3 billion monthly active users, far more than Twitter and...
Data collection is threatening our privacy
The world of online shopping is growing extremely quickly. As a consequence, the importance of targeting is also really important and, therefore, companies are making great use of the enormous availability of data. The implementation of cookies on almost every website...
The Infinite Monkey Paradox
To most people the notion of infinity is unfathomable. That has to do with the strange behavior some things demonstrate when the concept of infinity is introduced. Think for example of an infinite time horizon. No one knows what it feels like for an infinite amount of...
What God’s number has to do with a Rubik’s Cube
The Rubik’s Cube: we have probably all tried to solve it. Some of us failed to do it and some of us have found real successes. The 3-D combination puzzle was invented in 1974 by the Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture Ernő Rubik. As of March 2021, over...
Nice guys finish first
What is the best strategy for the tribes in Candyland? Find out together with Sjors Keet.
The winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics 2021
On the 11th of October the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens “for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships”. Loosely speaking, these researchers are looking at ways to address several...
Why do we feel as though our friends are more popular than us?
Whilst this may appear as an insult, or a bleak depiction of one’s lonely life in comparison to the popular lives of others, this feeling is actually a mathematical phenomenon that appears regularly in everyday scenarios. This phenomenon is known as the “Friendship Paradox”. – Lydia Nawas
Simpson’s Paradox
In 1951 Edward Simpson published a paper discussing the interpretation of contingency tables. He discusses a phenomenon that is still occurring in today’s statistics. It is called after his own name, Simpson’s Paradox. An Example Simpson’s Paradox can be...
Will the Netherlands win the UEFA EURO 2020?
We had to wait seven years for it but after two missed tournaments the Dutch national team are participating in the UEFA European Football Championship this summer. Therefore, we will see the so-called “Oranjegekte” again [1]. Obviously, the Netherlands only...
Home advantage in football: does it exist?
[latexpage] Football is the most popular sport of the world. It is to some extent even part of our culture. Especially during the world championships, the whole country is in the grip of this sport. Everyone basically wants the same thing: their team to win. A very...
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