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Interestingly, 37 also shows up in the Optimal Stopping / Secretary Problem.
by raghus 3y ago
Interestingly, 37 also shows up in the Optimal Stopping / Secretary Problem.
- justanotherjoe 3y ago[dead]
- nathanfig 3y agoWas just about to comment this. Wonder if anyone more mathematically inclined can see a relationship.
- Someone 3y agoI don’t know that problem and don’t feel like googling it, but it’s a reasonable guess that’s because 1/e ≈ 0.36787944
- drhagen 3y agoThat seems unlikely. Those numbers only look related in base 10. 1/e is about a third of 1 and 37 is about a third of 100, which is why they look similar in base 10. In base 16, 1/e is about 0.5e2d58 and 37 is 25. And prime numbers are prime numbers regardless of base.
- gowld 3y agoThat's what PP was saying, in not so many words.
- FabHK 3y ago100/e is close to 37, regardless of base. (That 100 would be chosen as a convenient scaling factor for our notion of “percent” only in base 10 is true, but a separate point.)
- bondarchuk 3y agoNo, that is precisely the point.
- Biganon 3y agoAnd thanks to 1/e being 0.367, in Pokemon Go when I catch 1000 Pokemon and each of them has a 1 in 1000 chance of being shiny, I have a 36.7% chance of having zero shinies among them, or approximately a 63% chance of the reciprocate, AKA having at least 1 shiny among them. 1000 is arbitrary of course, but the bigger the number the closer to 1/e. See "Bernoulli trials"
- skykooler 3y agoIt's also the most common number picked when people are asked to think of a random number between 1 and 100.