Student Pages - Obsolete

This problem develops a very important skill of working with large sets of numbers and getting a 'feel' for their properties. This is an advanced mathematical artform and develops with experience and exposure. You can think of this problem as numerical detective work. If you enjoy this task you may find that you will be well suited to working as an industrial mathematician.

In industrial and research applications large volumes of data are routinely used. Being able quickly to spot anomalous data can save huge amounts of time and effort. Unfortunately, in large real-world applications of statistics and mathematics errors and bugs in software are unavoidable and may only manifest themselves after months or even years of use. In addition, the computer software can run in length to millions of lines of code and it may take hours or even days to run the programme to generate the numbers in the first place. Clearly tracking down these bugs is a tricky task, and the data are often the first place to begin to try to narrow down the search.

At A-level, checking answers is a crucial part of mathematical development and this problem will develop this skill. It also raises several interesting statistical points and the statistical ideas concerning the likelihood of the explanation of the errors being correct are important.

Discussion should follow this problem about