A Renaissance gambling dispute spawned probability theory

joenot443•about 1 hour 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...

AdmiralAsshat•20 minutes 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.

benbreen•about 1 hour 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

skywal_l•about 3 hours 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•about 2 hours 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•about 1 hour 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.

sorokod•33 minutes ago

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

seanhunter•13 minutes 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.

A Renaissance gambling dispute spawned probability theory

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