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Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons™
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Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Confidence Interval, Ursula Whitcher
Confidence Interval, Ursula Whitcher
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
A poem about estimating probabilities.
Mathematics And The Hunger Games, Michael A. Lewis
Mathematics And The Hunger Games, Michael A. Lewis
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
The Hunger Games plot features a dystopian future in which twelve outer districts are oppressed by a centralized capital. The story focuses on the heroism of a sixteen-year-old girl named Katniss and how she tries to rise above the oppression that she experiences. It also features a special lottery and other twists that are sources of mathematical interest. This essay focuses on some of the mathematical issues raised by The Hunger Games in an effort to show that this story can be used to teach students (as well as other interested parties) some important concepts from mathematics.
Constructing Phylogenetic Trees Using Maximum Likelihood, Anna Cho
Constructing Phylogenetic Trees Using Maximum Likelihood, Anna Cho
Scripps Senior Theses
Maximum likelihood methods are used to estimate the phylogenetic trees for a set of species. The probabilities of DNA base substitutions are modeled by continuous-time Markov chains. We use these probabilities to estimate which DNA bases would produce the data that we observe. The topology of the tree is also determined using base substitution probabilities and conditional likelihoods. Felsenstein [2] introduced this method of finding an estimate for the maximum likelihood phylogenetic tree. We will explore this method in detail in this paper.