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Law of Truly Large Numbers

With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen (Diaconis and Mosteller 1989). Littlewood (1953) considered an event which occurs one in a million times to be ``surprising.'' Taking this definition, close to 100,000 surprising events are ``expected'' each year in the United States alone and, in the world at large, ``we can be absolutely sure that we will see incredibly remarkable events'' (Diaconis and Mosteller 1989).

See also Coincidence, Strong Law of Large Numbers, Strong Law of Small Numbers, Weak Law of Large Numbers


References

Diaconis, P. and Mosteller, F. ``Methods of Studying Coincidences.'' J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 84, 853-861, 1989.

Littlewood, J. E. Littlewood's Miscellany. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1986.




© 1996-9 Eric W. Weisstein
1999-05-26