By Simon Širca
Springer
Also available at the CERN bookshop
This book aims to deliver a concise, practical and intuitive introduction to probability and statistics for undergraduate and graduate students of physics and other natural sciences. The author attempts to provide a textbook in which mathematical complexity is reduced to a minimum, yet without sacrificing precision and clarity. To increase the appeal of the book for students, classic dice-throwing and coin-tossing examples are replaced or accompanied by real physics problems, all of which come with full solutions.
In the first part (chapters 1–6), the basics of probability and distributions are discussed. A second block of chapters is dedicated to statistics, specifically the determination of distribution parameters based on samples. More advanced topics follow, including Markov processes, the Monte Carlo method, stochastic population modelling, entropy and information.
The author also chooses to cover some subjects that, according to him, are disappearing from modern statistics courses. These include extreme-value distributions, the maximum-likelihood method and linear regressions using singular-value decomposition. A set of appendices concludes the volume.
