Juggling Probabilities


Tuesday, March 8, 2005
2:00p.m., Forestry Bldg., Room 304

Greg Warrington
Wake Forest University

Abstract: There is a natural way to view a person juggling as a Markov process by assuming that the juggler throws to random heights. I make this association for the simplest reasonable model of random juggling and compute the steady state probabilities in terms of the Stirling numbers of the second kind. I also explore several alternate models of juggling. The mathematics will be illustrated with juggling demonstrations.