Rolling the dice to understand a not-so-intuitive kind of distribution

  • Authors:

  • Paul Abraham

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Mathematical Sciences, Kent State University Stark Campus, 6000 Frank Ave NW, Canton OH 44720 USA

  • Venue:
  • PRIMUS: problems, resources, and issues in mathematics undergraduate studies
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Motivated by an exercise in [4, p. 229], the author describes a classroom investigation of the triangular-shaped frequency distribution that arises from the sum of two independent random variables uniformly distributed in the interval [1,6]. Included are three dice rolling experiments for small sample sizes, a TI-92 function for large sample sized dice rolling simulations, a TI-92 program for independent sum simulations much less discrete than dice rolling, and a discussion of how they were used in the classroom.