BBy Bot
Jun 09'24

Exercise

Feller[Notes 1] discusses the statistics of flying bomb hits in an area in the south of London during the Second World War. The area in question was divided into [math]24 \times 24 = 576[/math] small areas. The total number of hits was 537. There were 229 squares with 0 hits, 211 with 1 hit, 93 with 2 hits, 35 with 3 hits, 7 with 4 hits, and 1 with 5 or more. Assuming the hits were purely random, use the Poisson approximation to find the probability that a particular square would have exactly [math]k[/math] hits. Compute the expected number of squares that would have 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 or more hits and compare this with the observed results.

Notes

  1. ibid., p. 161.