Updated to conform to Mathematica® 7.0, Introduction to Probability with Mathematica®, Second Editioncontinues to show students how to easily create simulations from templates and solve problems usingMathematica. It provides a real understanding of probabilistic modeling and the analysis of data and encourages the application of these ideas to practical problems. The accompanying CD-ROM offers instructors the option of creating class notes, demonstrations, and projects.

New to the Second Edition

• Expanded section on Markov chains that includes a study of absorbing chains
• New sections on order statistics, transformations of multivariate normal random variables, and Brownian motion
• More example data of the normal distribution
• More attention on conditional expectation, which has become significant in financial mathematics
• Additional problems from Actuarial Exam P
• New appendix that gives a basic introduction to Mathematica
• New examples, exercises, and data sets, particularly on the bivariate normal distribution
• New visualization and animation features from Mathematica 7.0
• Updated Mathematica notebooks on the CD-ROM (Go to Downloads/Updates tab for link to CD files.)
  
  

After covering topics in discrete probability, the text presents a fairly standard treatment of common discrete distributions. It then transitions to continuous probability and continuous distributions, including normal, bivariate normal, gamma, and chi-square distributions. The author goes on to examine the history of probability, the laws of large numbers, and the central limit theorem. The final chapter explores stochastic processes and applications, ideal for students in operations research and finance.

        The CD that accompanies this book contains a Mathematica notebook for each text section. The print text was made without color, by publisher specification, but color effects are included into the electronic version. Otherwise the electronic notebooks are identical to the print version.  When a notebook is first loaded you can select the Evaluate Initialization Cells command under the Evaluation menu to reproduce the output.  The look of the notebooks in the front end will depend on what style sheet you are using; I have applied the Book/Textbook stylesheet to these files.

        Also on the disk are two packages: the KnoxProb7綰tilities?package for users of version 7 of Mathematica, and KnoxProb6`Utilities` for users of version 6.  Move the appropriate folder into the AddOns\ExtraPackages subdirectory of your main Mathematica directory in order to allow the electronic book to run.  The electronic files are written for version 7, so the Needs commands in the notebooks should be modified to load KnoxProb6`Utilities` instead of KnoxProb7`Utiilities` for Mathematica 6 users. The main differences between the two Utilities versions are: (1) the Histogram command that I had written for the version 6 package is eliminated in the version 7 package because Wolfram Research included its own suitable Histogram command into the kernel in version 7; and (2) the ProbabilityHistogram command had to be rewritten for version 7 due to the elimination of the BarCharts package that it had relied on. Both packages are updates of those in the KnoxProb`Utilities` package that was available for the first edition of the book, adapting to the major changes in the structure of Mathematica that happened as it went into version 6.0.  Among the most important changes for our purposes was that many statistical commands that had previously been contained in external packages were moved into the kernel, so that these packages no longer needed to be loaded. The electronic book has been subjected to a lot of testing, and it should operate well.