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From: lew@ihuxr.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.math
Subject: Never mind, Jim!
Message-ID: <658@ihuxr.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 22-Sep-83 16:41:32 EDT
Article-I.D.: ihuxr.658
Posted: Thu Sep 22 16:41:32 1983
Date-Received: Sat, 24-Sep-83 02:01:27 EDT
Organization: BTL Naperville, Il.
Lines: 18

Words cannot express my mortification. It looks like Jim Balter's derivation
is perfectly sound, after all.

I didn't like Jim's justification for taking n times the probability of
n-1 points falling in a fixed semicircle to get the answer.
I really butchered my paraphrase of this step, I should have said:

"The probability of a thing happening once in N tries is N times the
probability of a thing happening once in 1 try."

Of course, this ISN'T true for independent events, but as Jim stated, the
events here are mutually exclusive. It is an elementary theorem that
the probability of the union of a set of mutually exclusive events
is the sum of their probabilities. I don't know what my problem was.

	Splattered all over the net ...

		Lew Mammel, Jr. ihuxr!lew