“Suddenly, the idea of expected value doesn’t make sense to me.”

The second I heard that out of the mouth of our discrete mathematics faculty, who is supposed to know what expected value is and how to explain it, I got just a little worried. He did manage to explain it, but it was still quite odd to hear someone who carries a Ph.D in Mathematics admit that such a “simple” concept in combinatorics didn’t make sense.

(For those wondering, the expected value is more akin to the average value of an outcome — that is, it’s an expression of the value most likely to occur. At least, that’s my understanding of it. An example — if you roll two dice, you can calculate the expected value that the two die will land with a sum of seven.)

So, yeah. Watch out for Ph.D’s who suddenly admit that basic concepts make no sense to them.