Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2004 iii Paper 11 3 Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Expose the independent coordinates in order and let , . This is the Doob exposure martingale. For fixed earlier coordinates, write . The remaining coordinates have the same distribution for all , and the coordinate-change hypothesis gives . Thus the conditional range of has length at most , and its conditional mean is zero.
Here is the Hoeffding lemma needed for the sharp constant. If a mean-zero random variable lies in an interval of length , set . Its second derivative is the variance under the exponentially tilted law. Under any such law, variance is at most , by comparison with squared distance from the interval midpoint. Since , integration gives for all real . Applying this conditionally and iterating the tower property yieldsThe exponential Markov bound now givesFor choose . Apply the same argument to and add the two tails, proving the McDiarmid inequalityFor , is constant almost surely, and every positive-deviation probability is zero.
For the neighbourhood application, the ambient points must be elements of , equivalently binary strings; the printed is a type error. An -element ambient set could not generally satisfy the stated exponential-size lower bound. Use the uniform product probability space on the Boolean cube and set . Flipping one coordinate changes this Hamming distance by at most one, so . Put . Since , the proved two-sided inequality gives, for ,Consequently ; the same bound is immediate if . ThereforeThis proves the Boolean cube expansion from bounded differences:The meaningful range is ; real radii are interpreted by the inequality on the integer-valued Hamming distance. The converted TeX's final is another corruption: the original PDF has .
Summable and harmonic event probabilities 2026-10-14
Take independent random variables , each with the continuous uniform distribution on , and set . Then , and the events are mutually independent events. The product probability space supplies a model for the entire infinite sequence; a finite list of simulated values is only an illustration.
For , the p-series is summable:The Basel problem supplies the total sum, and the integral test for convergence gives the displayed tail bound. The First Borel-Cantelli lemma makes the limsup of events have probability zero. In fact, the tail bound implies that the probability of even one alarm at or after is at most ; for , it is at most . This bound remains valid for dependent events with the same individual probabilities.
For , the harmonic series diverges, so the Second Borel-Cantelli lemma makes the limsup of events have probability one. There is also an exact finite-horizon calculation using independent events:For any fixed , this finite product of numbers tends to zero as . Every infinite tail therefore contains an alarm almost surely, even though the individual probabilities tend to zero.
