Essential Mathematics for Quantum Computing

Appendix 4: Probability

The study of gambling, specifically the throwing of dice, led to the mathematical field of probability. Probability is the study of how likely an event is to occur given a number of possible outcomes. A real number between 0 and 1 is assigned to each event where 0 signifies the event has no chance of happening and 1 signifies the event will always happen. You can also multiply these numbers by 100 to get a percentage that the event will happen. All the probabilities for all possible outcomes must sum to 1. For instance, the probability of a coin flip landing on heads is 0.5 or 50%. For tails, it is also 0.5 or 50%. Both of these numbers add up to 1. From these basics, this chapter will go over the probability needed in ...