Life tables are mathematical tables that document probabilities of dying and life expectancies at different ages in a society. Thus, the life table contains some essential features of the health of a population. Probability is often regarded as a difficult branch of mathematics. Life tables provide an interesting approach to introducing concepts…

When hoping to initiate or sustain students' interest in mathematics teachers should always consider relevance, relevance to students' lives and in the middle and later years of instruction in high school and university, accessibility. A topic such as the mathematics behind networks science, more specifically scale-free graphs, is up-to-date,…

In this article, the author describes the format of the Con Test, an Australian television game show which followed the same general rules and game play as the UK show PokerFace. At the end of each round a contestant needs to decide whether or not he or she should fold. A contestant needs to know how likely it is that he or she is in last place.…

In Volume 23(2) of the "Australian Senior Mathematics Journal," Boncek and Harden present an exercise in fitting a Markov chain model to rainfall data for Darwin Airport (Boncek & Harden, 2009). Days are subdivided into those with precipitation and precipitation-free days. The author abbreviates these labels to wet days and dry days.…

Recently there have been several news items about possible cancer clusters in the Australian media. The term "cancer cluster" is used when an unusually large number of people in one geographic area, often a workplace, are diagnosed with cancer in a short space of time. In this paper the authors explore this important health issue using…