Recently on his blog (here), Robin mentioned an amazing book, called "A Million Random Digits" published by RAND corporation. The book was initially published in 1955, but RAND published a nice (and expensive) second edition. A great thing is that ... [Read more...]

Today, at lunch, Matthieu told us a nice story (or call it a paradox if you like) about the probability to find you seat empty when you get in a place.  a plane full of nuns Assume that you are in the line to get in the airplane, you are ... [Read more...]

Valentine's day is a nice opportunity to post on hot and sexy topics... Well, it's also an important day that I should not miss, probably as much as Saint Patrick's my wife's birthday. And as I mentioned last week (here), it is difficult to get the... [Read more...]

The following simple code can be used to find roots of functions (based on the secant algorithm), secant=function(fun, x0, x1, tolerence=1e-07, niter=500){for ( i in 1:niter ) { x2 [Read more...]