Record Breakers

How often records fall

An interactive lesson with 6 steps, about 5 minutes: you predict, drag and solve, with instant feedback on every answer. It runs in your browser and needs JavaScript.

What you’ll learn

• For random, independent values, the $k$-th is a record with probability $\frac1k$.
• Expected records in $n$ values: $H_n \approx \ln n + 0.577$.
• Many more records than this, especially recent ones, point to a trend.

Steps

1. Is it a record?
2. The tenth year
3. Watching records fall
4. A century of records
5. Too many records
6. Ten records