Life in the maths department

[pozorvlak]

From an email which went round the department yesterday:

The euro 2008 championships start on Saturday, so it's time for the departmental football competition. Entries cost 5 pounds, half of which will be donated to SANELine and half returned in prizes (25% 1st, 15% 2nd, 10% 3rd). To enter you need to guess the scores for the first round of the competition. ... Alternatively you can enter at random, in which case I will allocate goals to each team according to a Poisson distribution with parameter 4/3.

I went for a random entry, on the basis that I know so little about football that my guesses would be little better than random anyway. Among my randomly-chosen results were that Romania would beat France 1-0, which seems unlikely even to me: on the other hand, I'll be laughing if it actually comes to pass.