

Shuffling a fifty-two-card deck is easy enough. But suppose the deck contained infinitely many cards: could it still be "shuffled"? The answer is entirely up to you! Welcome to the world of paradoxes that play with infinity…



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π turns up almost everywhere, sometimes even in the most fanciful fields. In mathematics, of course, we encounter it in geometry, analysis and number theory… As a result of this omnipresence, it appears throughout the other sciences too!

It is easy to picture numbers as points on an oriented line with an origin. Yet this construction must be carried out with some rigor—especially if we want to represent infinitesimal or infinite numbers!

To calculate France's population, Laplace proposes a sampling method based on births and introduces the normal distribution to estimate the error. It would take until the 21st century for Insee to draw inspiration from his method.

Analytic and probabilistic number theory was one of Paul Erdős's favorite subjects. Here is a small selection of his contributions in this field, picked here and there from topics that can still be presented accessibly.
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