The Improbability Principle

A small group of us attended this talk at the Royal Statistical Society. It was of particular interest to me as a statistician and a professional ‘gambler’ Even if you have little or no grasp of statistics you will still find this very informative and amusing as the layman is not excluded from understanding ‘Why incredibly unlikely things keep happening’.

David J. Hand is emeritus professor of mathematics and a senior research investigator at Imperial College London. He is the former president of the Royal Statistical Society and the chief scientific adviser to Winton Capital Management, one of Europe’s most successful algorithmic-trading hedge funds. He is the author of many books, including The Information Generation: How Data Rules Our World and Statistics: A Very Short Introduction, and has published more than three hundred scientific papers.

David J. Hand argues that extraordinarily rare events are anything but. In fact, they’re commonplace. Not only that, we should all expect to experience a miracle roughly once every month.

But Hand is no believer in superstitions, prophecies, or the paranormal. His definition of “miracle” is thoroughly rational. No mystical or supernatural explanation is necessary to understand why someone is lucky enough to win the lottery twice, or is destined to be hit by lightning three times and still survive. All we need, Hand argues, is a firm grounding in a powerful set of laws: the laws of inevitability, of truly large numbers, of selection, of the probability lever, and of near enough.

Together, these constitute Hand’s groundbreaking Improbability Principle. And together, they explain why we should not be so surprised to bump into a friend in a foreign country, or to come across the same unfamiliar word four times in one day. Hand wrestles with seemingly less explicable questions as well: what the Bible and Shakespeare have in common, why financial crashes are par for the course, and why lightning does strike the same place (and the same person) twice. Along the way, he teaches us how to use the Improbability Principle in our own lives—including how to cash in at a casino and how to recognize when a medicine is truly effective.

An irresistible adventure into the laws behind “chance” moments and a trusty guide for understanding the world and universe we live in,

The Improbability Principle

will transform how you think about serendipity and luck, whether it’s in the world of business and finance or you’re merely sitting in your backyard, tossing a ball into the air and wondering where it will land.

Doors at 6.30 pm for talk at 7.00 pm. Talk ends around 8pm.

Please arrive early to have a glass of wine from our charity wine bar, find your seat and chat with other members. David Hand’s chosen charity is The British Heart Foundation.

All our talks are open to the general public and free to attend but we do ask if you can make a donation of whatever they can afford to cover the costs of room and equipment hire and to help keep our talks free to all.