ABSTRACT
Flashy and confident, vos Savant is someone professional mathematicians love to hate. In her column for September 9, 1990, vos Savant answered a well-known brain teaser submitted by one of her readers. Vos Savant advised her correspondent to switch doors. Sticking with the first choice gives a one-third chance of winning, she said, but switching doubles the odds to two-thirds. To convince her readers, she asked them to imagine a million doors. "people pick door No. 1," she said. The table demonstrates, she wrote, that "when people switch, people win two out of three times and lose one time in three; but when people don't switch, people only win one in three times."But the table did not silence her critics. The letters had gotten shrill, with suggestions that she was the goat and that women look at mathematical problems differently from men.
