Empirical probability question: if you have N children what is the expected length L of the longest chain of descendants you might have? Ie how long before your lineage dies out? Make suitable assumptions about distributions of offspring. Feels like a 101 question.
I think the keyword you want is Galton-Watson process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galton%E2%80%93Watson_process …
-
-
This caused me to look up my surname which has apparently been going strong for 2700 years if you believe Chinese genealogies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuan_(surname) …Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
-
-
Just taught a discussion on these today. The math is quite beautiful and uses moment generating functions. Turns out that composing the mgf of the offspring distribution with itself n many times, evaluating at 0 and taking n to infinity yields the extinction probability.
-
Here's the set of notes we use in class. Chapter 14 is the one. It's very accessible. https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~gravner/MAT135A/resources/lecturenotes.pdf …
- 2 more replies
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.