Recent content by adnanaziz

The problem of points & one on option pricing marvinrobot is right again, check out the Wikipedia article, Problem of points - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, or Devlin's book "The Problem of Points" for more history/details. Here's a problem in our book that's right out of computational...

number of sticks to add up to 1 & a problem from the birth of probability marvinrobot's solution is quite right - the slightly tricky part is showing that the probability that the sum of N uniform [0,1] IID random variables is less than 1 is (1/N!). This probability is a multiple integral of...

The number of rolls to see all 6 numbers on a die If you are wondering how koupparis came up with 14.7, here's one approach: First we prove that if ($\langle X_1, X_2,\ldots \rangle$ ) is a sequence of Bernoulli IID random variables, with ($p(X_i = 1) = p$), then the expected time to see the...

My co-author, Amit Prakash, and I have very recently completed our book Algorithms For Interviews. (By way of introduction, I'm a professor at UT Austin, and Amit works at Google.) The book includes 174 solved problems. It targets people interviewing for software jobs, but there's quite a lot...