Paul the octopus, who shot to fame during this year's football World Cup in South Africa for correctly predicting the outcome of games, has died, his aquarium in Germany said Tuesday.
"Management and staff at the Oberhausen Sea Life Centre were devastated to discover that oracle octopus Paul, who achieved global renown during the recent World Cup, had passed away overnight," the aquarium said in a sombre statement.
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Luck of Paul the Octopus came down to statistics
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The two co-presented a talk last night entitled Fun with Statistics . While number crunching of this kind might not be your first choice when stirring up a bit of fun, certainly the subject can help us understand probability and chance.
“Statistics is very important in everyday life and we try to relate it to everyday life,” Mr Curran said in advance of the talk last night.
For example, he said statistics alone confirmed that the V2 rockets raining down on London during the second World War were not guided devices and landed randomly, an analysis achieved using something called a “Poisson distribution”.
Dr Donovan cited an example of the power of statistics in something he called “birthday bingo”. It might seem improbable but you only need 23 individuals to reach a 50/50 probability that two of those 23 will share a birthday.
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