Chance Rules: An Informal Guide to Probability, Risk and Statistics

Chance affects all our lives. From the genes we inherit to the environment into which we are born, life is a gamble. It is chance that decrees who becomes an overnight millionaire from winning a lottery and who ends up the victim of a fatal air crash. And in nature electrons and the like obey only the laws of probability rather than those of Newton. In Chance Rules aspects of chance, risk and probability, from simple games involving the toss of a coin, to the use of clinical trials in medicine and the evaluation of alternative therapies, are explored in an informal and hopefully entertaining manner. The book is aimed at all those who would like to discover more about chance and the way it operates in a variety of settings. Professor Brian S. Everitt is the Head of the Biostatistics and Computing Department, Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College, London. He is the author of about 70 journal papers and 30 books on statistics.