Stability of a randomly legged round table
Question
Three legs are attached to the rim of a circular tabletop, each at an independent, uniformly random position. What is the probability the table stands up?
Short answer
. The table stands exactly when the three points are not contained in any semicircle. For each point, the chance the other two lie in the half-circle clockwise from it is , and these three events are disjoint, so a semicircle contains all three with probability .
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Continuous Random Variables and Probability Density Functions
- Independence
- Cumulative Distribution Functions
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