How many coin tosses would you need until you get $n$ Heads or $m$ Tails?

Abstract

We harness both human ingenuity and the power of symbolic computation to study the number of coin tosses until reaching $n$ Heads or $m$ Tails. We also talk about the closely related problem of reaching $n$ Heads and $m$ Tails. This paper is accompanied by a Maple package that enables fast computation of expectations, variances, and higher moments of these quantities.

12 pages, 2 figures