A fascinating account of the breakthrough ideas that transformed
probability and statistics
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, gamblers and mathematicians
transformed the idea of chance from a mystery into the discipline of
probability, setting the stage for a series of breakthroughs that
enabled or transformed innumerable fields, from gambling, mathematics,
statistics, economics, and finance to physics and computer science. This
book tells the story of ten great ideas about chance and the thinkers
who developed them, tracing the philosophical implications of these
ideas as well as their mathematical impact.
Persi Diaconis and Brian Skyrms begin with Gerolamo Cardano, a
sixteenth-century physician, mathematician, and professional gambler who
helped develop the idea that chance actually can be measured. They
describe how later thinkers showed how the judgment of chance also can
be measured, how frequency is related to chance, and how chance,
judgment, and frequency could be unified. Diaconis and Skyrms explain
how Thomas Bayes laid the foundation of modern statistics, and they
explore David Hume's problem of induction, Andrey Kolmogorov's general
mathematical framework for probability, the application of computability
to chance, and why chance is essential to modern physics. A final
idea--that we are psychologically predisposed to error when judging
chance--is taken up through the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos
Tversky.
Complete with a brief probability refresher, Ten Great Ideas about
Chance is certain to be a hit with anyone who wants to understand the
secrets of probability and how they were discovered.
