We are all grown to believe that flipping a coin in the air will result in 50% chance of getting “heads” or “tails”. Coin toss became the standard example of a random event in probability courses, but a study by Persi Diaconis, Susan Holmes, and Richard Montgomery on the Dynamical Bias in the Coin Toss proved otherwise. Turns out that the chance of a coin falling on the same side it started on is 0.51, and, respectively, there’s a 0.49 chance that it will fall on the other side. At first this difference might seem insignificant, but in the long run this kind of differences is what makes gamblers lose a lot of money to casinos. The full article is available here, and even though extensive knowledge of physics is required to fully comprehend it, there's still something satisfying in riffling through the pages in an attempt to understand the models, vectors and the long formulas.
