UREM-ULB :
Unité de Recherche sur l’Enseignement des Mathématiques

Découvert sur le site des Wiskundemeisjes

Terence Tao, vient d’écrire un article à propos de l’élection présidentielle américaine.

« The U.S. presidential election is now only a few weeks away. The politics of this election are of course interesting and important, but I do not want to discuss these topics here (there is not exactly a shortage of other venues for such a discussion), and would request that readers refrain from doing so in the comments to this post.

However, I thought it would be apropos to talk about some of the basic mathematics underlying electoral polling, and specifically to explain the fact, which can be highly unintuitive to those not well versed in statistics, that polls can be accurate even when sampling only a tiny fraction of the entire population. »

Small samples, and the margin of error