The thirty-fourth Math Webinar in English took place on Wednesday, March 20th, 2024 from 5 pm until 6 pm with Leila Schneps, Research Director at the Scientific Research Center in Paris, France, as our invited speaker. This virtual event was free and open to the general public.
In this thirty-fourth Math Webinar in English, Leila Schneps presented on “Going to Prison for a Math Error”. The speaker explained how mathematics appears in criminal trials in different ways, from calculating the probability that a crime took place to using statistics to identify physical traces, from analyzing DNA samples to determine whether the accused was present to calculating the weight of a given piece of evidence. Leila Schneps described examples of typical situations based on real-life trials to emphasize the dangers of leaving mathematical estimations to our intuition. This virtual event was co-organized by the Mathematical Association of America (MAA).
