Data of this kind can be represented as observations from a Poisson distribution, which was originally developed by Siméon Denis Poisson in France in the 1830s to represent the pattern of wrongful convictions per year. Since then it has been used to model everything from the number of goals scored by a football team in a match or the number of winning lottery tickets each week, to the number of Prussian officers kicked to death by their horses each year. In each of these situations there is a very large number of opportunities for an event to happen, but each with a very low chance of
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