A Renaissance gambling dispute spawned probability theory

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-a-renaissance-gambling-dispute-spawned-probability-theory/

by sohkamyung • 3 months ago

121 20 3 months ago

scientificamerican.com

skywal_l• 3 months ago

a French gambler and intellectual socialite enlisted the help

Imagine Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat teaming together to solve your problem.

The_Blade• 3 months ago

Luca Pacioli invented (or really, put down on paper) double-entry accounting

it is funny how probability has always been way behind other maths. i got to use the Birthday problem at work, once, which made the math undergrad totally worth it

fortunately my Polymarket and Kalshi wagers are protected by AES et al

c7b• 3 months ago

As one lecturer put it: modern probability theory derived from two foundations - measure theory and gambling. The latter explains why it has long lacked mainstream mathematical recognition :)

But that's all in the past. Probability is absolutely established in math academia today, Fields medals and all. And despite its applied nature it's pervasive even in pure math.

sorokod2• 3 months ago

In what way was it always behind? This work of Fermat and Pascal is ballpark contemporary to the development of calculus.

seanhunter• 3 months ago

Right, and Cauchy is the person we have to thank for Bayes’ Theorem, and of course Euler, De Moivre, Poisson and Gauss for the Gaussian integral[1]. You can’t really get figures more central to mathematics than that.

[1] Athough Gauss apparently credited it to Laplace.

benbreen• 3 months ago

Just wanted to flag that the works of Ian Hacking, especially The Emergence of Probability (1975) and The Taming of Chance (1990) are excellent on this. Dense and challenging at times but also well written and the product of a very original mind.

The latter book has a Wikipedia page with some more info - was surprised to see Hacking not mentioned here since the featured article is partly based on his work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Taming_of_Chance

pjacotg• 3 months ago

I'm busy reading a book [0] by Keith Devlin about the correspondence between Pascal and Fermat. It's called the unfinished game and has been really good so far. It goes through the letters and provides some context around them. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/4443547-the-unfinishe...

joenot443• 3 months ago

The article links to a series of letters between Fermat, Pascal, and Carcavi which are wonderfully intelligent and readable, while also deeply kind and personal.

1. I have been delighted to have had the thoughts conformed to those of M. Pascal, for I admire infinitely his genius and I believe him very capable of coming to the end of all that which he will undertake. The friendship that he offers me is so dear to me and so considerable that I must have no difficulty in making some use of it in the publishing of my Treatises.
Our blows always continue and I am as glad as you in the admiration that our thoughts are arranged so exactly that it seems that they have taken one same route and make one same path

It makes me wonder if future generations will look back on correspondences between guys like Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.

https://probabilityandfinance.com/pulskamp/Pascal/Sources/pa...

divbzero2• 3 months ago

Perhaps future generations will reference certain threads here on HN.

mswphd2• 3 months ago

This does happen some on other websites. I've often seen people in math discuss things that Bill Thurston (a fields medalist) has posted on mathoverflow

https://mathoverflow.net/users/9062/bill-thurston

note that he has been deceased for nearly 15 years now.

fakedang• 3 months ago

We're already referencing the Dropbox antagonist whenever we can.

mswphd2• 3 months ago

In math, Grothendieck's correspondences are quite famous. Here's a book that is entirely 300 pages of letters between him and J.P. Serre

https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~leila.schneps/grothendieckcircl...

There are many others for Grothendieck though.

Another example is how Godel wrote a letter to Von Neumann towards the end of his life. This letter contained, among other things, the (now very funny) question of whether a certain NP complete problem may be solvable in quadratic time.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~odonnell/15455-s17/hartmanis-on-gode...

Practically though, modern correspondence is often through a disjoint set of technologies, that (importantly) someone cleaning up the estate of a deceased person does not necessarily have access to. So it seems unlikely we'll get this kind of insight going forward (with notable exceptions, for example the Epstein emails).

Natsu• 3 months ago

It makes me wonder if future generations will look back on correspondences between guys like Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.

We kinda had that, on Usenet, before spammers flooded it to death.

Xmd5a• 3 months ago

I have not time to send you the demonstration of a difficulty which greatly astonished M. de Mere, for he has a very good mind, but he is not a geometer (this is, as you know, a great defect) and he does not even understand that a mathematical line is divisible to infinity and believes very well to understand that it is composed of points in finite number, and never have I been able to pull him from it. If you could do that, one would render him perfect.

AdmiralAsshat• 3 months ago

Gambling is also (allegedly) responsible for giving us the sandwich[0] and the modern sushi roll.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Montagu,_4th_Earl_of_Sand...

There's a coffee-table book in there somewhere.

quercusa• 3 months ago

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Bernstein is an enjoyable read on this.

ivansavz• 3 months ago

A nice video explainer about this dispute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YRfSe-f1FE

divbzero2• 3 months ago

… and a Student’s quest for quality beer led to the t-test.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sealy_Gosset

A Renaissance gambling dispute spawned probability theory

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