Modern Physics for Engineers Lecture slides 16b – Binomial distribution and Stirling’s approximation

This lecture part introduces the binomial distribution as the formal description useful for discussing distributions of "heads" and "tails", for example. It then introduces Stirling's approximation, which is very useful for large numbers of particles (or coin tosses), and leads to simple formulas. This also gives simple results for how wide we expect the distribution (of multiplicities) to be. (slides)