Ed Thorpe is the mathematician who wrote “Beat the Dealer.” In that book, he detailed his invention of card counting. He  proved for the first time that it was possible to beat the Las Vegas casinos in blackjack, something that was believed to be impossible. He also invented the Black-Scholes equation several years before Black and Scholes (and in fact Black and Scholes directed credited Thorpe’s writing for inspiring them), which resulted in a Nobel Prize. Except he didn’t share in the Prize because he used the equation to make millions of dollars on Wall Street rather than publishing it. But that’s another story.

Thorpe writes about the time he was asked to dinner with Warren Buffett. Ralph Gerard, the dean of UC Irvine, where Ed was a professor of mathematics, was thinking about moving his money from Buffett to Ed. Warren was secretly assessing Ed’s bona fides.

Ed passed muster when he correctly answered Warren’s question about the oddly numbered dice. This is a curious phenomenon. Let’s say you have three dice. The first die A is numbered 3,3,3,3,3,3. The second die is numbered 6,5,2,2,2,2. The third die C is numbered 4,4,4,4,1,1.

If you roll the dice, then most of the time, die A will beat B, B will beat C, and… C will beat A. Continue reading “Metas, Or, Biology is Non-Transitive” →