Probability for Physicists

Description

This book is designed as a practical and intuitive introduction to probability, statistics and random quantities for physicists. The book aims at getting to the main points by a clear, hands-on exposition supported by well-illustrated and worked-out examples. A strong focus on applications in physics and other natural sciences is maintained throughout. In addition to basic concepts of random variables, distributions, expected values and statistics, the book discusses the notions of entropy, Markov processes, and fundamentals of random number generation and Monte-Carlo methods Front Matter....Pages i-xiv Front Matter....Pages 1-1 Basic Terminology....Pages 3-29 Probability Distributions....Pages 31-64 Special Continuous Probability Distributions....Pages 65-91 Expected Values....Pages 93-121 Special Discrete Probability Distributions....Pages 123-142 Stable Distributions and Random Walks....Pages 143-174 Front Matter....Pages 175-175 Statistical Inference from Samples....Pages 177-201 Maximum-Likelihood Method....Pages 203-225 Method of Least Squares....Pages 227-258 Statistical Tests: Verifying Hypotheses....Pages 259-280 Front Matter....Pages 281-281 Entropy and Information \(\star \) ....Pages 283-305 Markov Processes \(\star \) ....Pages 307-323 The Monte–Carlo Method....Pages 325-345 Stochastic Population Modeling....Pages 347-359 Back Matter....Pages 361-415