"The Astronomer's fallacy. It is very hard to make a random selection of stars. If, for example, you see a star (with the naked eye) it is probably bright (as stars go). A lecturer was once making the point that middle class families were smaller than lower class ones. As a test he asked everyone to write down the number of children in his family. The average was larger than the lower class average. The obvious point he overlooked were that zero families were unrepresented in the audience. But further, families of n have a probability of being represented proportional to n; with all this, the result is to be expected."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
University of Cambridge alumniFellows of the Royal SocietyUniversity of Cambridge facultyMathematicians from England
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
p. 143
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Edensor_Littlewood
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
John Edensor Littlewood
John Edensor Littlewood (9 June 1885 – 6 September 1977) was a British mathematician, known for his work on mathematical analysis. He had a long collaboration with G. H. Hardy.
24 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by John Edensor Littlewood →
Related Quotes
"The Greeks first spoke a language which modern mathematicians can understand; as Littlewood said to me once, they are…"
"A good mathematical joke is better, and better mathematics, than a dozen mediocre papers."
"(A. S. Besicovitch) A mathematician's reputation rests on the number of bad proofs he has given. (Pioneer work is clu…"
"'The surprising thing about this paper is that a man who could write it--would.'"
"Landau kept a printed form for dealing with proofs of Fermat's last theorem. 'On page blank, lines blank to blank, yo…"
"I read in the proof-sheets of Hardy on Ramanujan: 'As someone said, each of the positive integers was one of his pers…"
"I recall once saying that when I had given the same lecture several times I couldn't help feeling that they really ou…"
"If he is consistent a man of the mathematical school washes his hands of applications. To someone who wants them he w…"
"I began on a question on elementary theory of numbers, in which I felt safe in my school days. It did not come out, n…"
"It was Mr. Littlewood (I believe) who remarked that "every positive integer was one of his personal friends.""