FINAL PROJECT: PROBABILITY & STATISTICS VISUALIZATIONS
PART I: PROPOSAL
11/20/06

For my final project for this class, I'm interested in moving away from complex programming and into complex math. (You could say I want to focus more on Nature and less on Code.) There are two things that drive this interest: First, I know I want to produce prints. I really enjoyed producing printed work last year, and writing code to generate printed output is a big part of what I wanted to do before coming to ITP and why I ended up here and not in a painting program. Second, I'm interested in working with probability and statistics, an area of math that I know relatively little about.

As a start, I'm thinking about doing visualizations of Poisson distribution. To be honest, everything I know about Poisson distribution comes from Gravity's Rainbow (in which it is used to describe how bombs fall on London during the Blitz) and a cursory review of the Wikipedia entry on the subject. It may be that Poisson distribution is in fact totally unsuitable for my purposes, in which case I will find some other model to use as a basis for the project (Bernoulli distribution? Von Mises Fisher distribution?). I'm not sure whether I should be thinking about probability mass functions or probability density functions. In any case, what I'm interested in is the interplay of randomness and probability -- the organization and predictibility of random information, or the way seemingly random information organizes itself. I have no idea what my visualizations will look like at this point, but here is an example of the type of visualization I'm thinking of:

This image represents the probability that an electron will be at a certain location in a Boron atom (i.e., the orbitals generated by Schrodinger's equation).

PART II: FINAL PROJECT

To read about the final project, "United States Mortality Statistics: 2002," please click here.