Math Awareness Month Public Lecture

Lionel LevineCornell University
The future of prediction

Friday, April 29, 2016 - 4:30pm
Malott 253

Can you predict the next term in this sequence?

0, 1, 3, 4, 9, 10, 12, 13, 27, 28, 30, 31, ...

I'll share my experience in a prediction tournament with thousands of players, focusing on the uses (and abuses!) of math in predicting the future. We'll see how randomness can be more predictable than you think, and determinism can be less predictable than you think. Finally, I'll hazard a few predictions with input from the audience: Will we ever know the $10^{100}$th digit of pi? Will we discover life on Mars? — and should we hope the answer is yes or no?