On August 24, 1966, a talented playwright by the name Tom Stoppard staged a play in Edinburgh, Scotland. The play had a curious title, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.” Its central characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are childhood friends of Hamlet (of Shakespearean fame). The play opens with Guildenstern repeatedly tossing coins which keep coming up Heads. Each outcome makes Guildenstern’s money-bag lighter and Rosencrantz’s, heavier. As the drumbeat of Heads continues with a pitiless persistence, Guildenstern is worried. He worries if he is secretly willing each coin to come up Heads as a self-inflicted punishment for some long-forgotten sin. Or if time stopped after the first flip, and he and Rosencrantz are experiencing the same outcome over and over again.
Law of Large Numbers
The foundation of the Law of Large Numbers lies in the assumption of Independent and Identically Distributed (IID) random variables. Independence implies that the…