Probability as a mathematical discipline has a surprisingly precise birth date and a curious origin: the gaming table.
History — Pascal, Fermat and the problem of points
Probability was born, as a mathematical discipline, from a correspondence of 1654 between two Frenchmen: Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) and Pierre de Fermat (1607–1665). The pretext was a problem posed to the philosopher Pascal by the Chevalier de Méré, a gambler: how should the stakes of a game interrupted before its end be divided fairly? (The famous “problem of points”).
Pascal and Fermat, tackling the question by letter, independently reached the same solution — but they did so by introducing the fundamental concept of expected value and by reasoning systematically about the future possibilities of the game. It is in these letters that, for the first time, one finds a clear idea of what today we call probability: no longer a vague notion of “luck”, but a rational calculation based on the enumeration of favourable and possible cases. The book that crystallised the new discipline, Ars conjectandi by Jakob Bernoulli, would arrive only posthumously in 1713 (Boyer, ch. 14); for a history of the ideas see also Kline (ch. 21).
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Topics: Probability
Concepts: Probability · Expected value
People: Jacob Bernoulli · Pierre de Fermat · Blaise Pascal