Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Bernstein is an enjoyable read on this.
A Renaissance gambling dispute spawned probability theory
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Re: A Renaissance gambling dispute spawned probability theory
#12The 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…
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Re: A Renaissance gambling dispute spawned probability theory
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what way was it always behind? This work of Fermat and Pascal is ballpark contemporary to the development of calculus.
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.
Most of the names you mention belong to the next (18th) century.
Gauss worked out some sort of probability distribution too.
Re: A Renaissance gambling dispute spawned probability theory
#14A nice video explainer about this dispute:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YRfSe-f1FE
Re: A Renaissance gambling dispute spawned probability theory
#15The 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…
Perhaps future generations will reference certain threads here on HN.
Re: A Renaissance gambling dispute spawned probability theory
#16… and a Student’s quest for quality beer led to the t-test.
Re: A Renaissance gambling dispute spawned probability theory
#17The 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…
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).
Re: A Renaissance gambling dispute spawned probability theory
#18The 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…
Perhaps future generations will reference certain threads here on HN.
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.
Re: A Renaissance gambling dispute spawned probability theory
#19Just 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…
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...
Re: A Renaissance gambling dispute spawned probability theory
#20The 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…
> 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.