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The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeenth-Century Letter that Made the World Modern: A Tale of How Mathematics Is Really Done - Hardcover

Devlin, Keith

 
9780465009107: The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeenth-Century Letter that Made the World Modern: A Tale of How Mathematics Is Really Done
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0465009107 ISBN 13: 9780465009107
Verlag: Basic Books, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

Before the mid-seventeenth century, scholars generally agreed that it was impossible to predict something by calculating mathematical outcomes. One simply could not put a numerical value on the likelihood that a particular event would occur. Even the outcome of something as simple as a dice roll or the likelihood of showers instead of sunshine was thought to lie in the realm of pure, unknowable chance.

The issue remained intractable until Blaise Pascal wrote to Pierre de Fermat in 1654, outlining a solution to the “unfinished game” problem: how do you divide the pot when players are forced to end a game of dice before someone has won? The idea turned out to be far more seminal than Pascal realized. From it, the two men developed the method known today as probability theory.

In The Unfinished Game, mathematician and NPR commentator Keith Devlin tells the story of this correspondence and its remarkable impact on the modern world: from insurance rates, to housing and job markets, to the safety of cars and planes, calculating probabilities allowed people, for the first time, to think rationally about how future events might unfold.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Keith Devlin is a senior researcher at Stanford University's Center for the Study of Language and Information and its executive director, a consulting professor in the Department of Mathematics, and a co-founder of the Stanford Media X research network and of the university's H-STAR institute. He has written twenty-five books and over seventy-five published research articles. He is the “Math Guy” on National Public Radio. He lives in Palo Alto, California.

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Verlag
Basic Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2008
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0465009107
ISBN 13 
9780465009107
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
208
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