ABSTRACT
Probabilities are nonnegative numbers associated with the outcomes of so-called random experiments. A random experiment is an experiment whose outcome is uncertain. Examples include throwing a pair of dice, tossing a coin, counting the number of defectives in a sample from a lot of manufactured items, and observing the time to failure of a tube in a heat exchanger, or a seal in a pump, or a bus section in an electrostatic precipitator. The set of possible outcomes of a random experiment is called the sample space and is usually designated by S. Then P(A), the probability of an event A, is the sum of the probabilities assigned to the outcomes constituting the subset A of the sample space S. Consider, for example, tossing a coin twice. The sample space can be described as S = { H H , H T , T H , T T } https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780429124754/be33da89-95f5-45e7-a067-f2fa13b8eb97/content/eq70.tif"/>
