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The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeenth-Century Letter That Made the World Modern (Basic Ideas) (Hardback)
Short Description for The Unfinished GameFrom NPRs Math Guy, the engaging tale of Blaise Pascal, Pierre de Fermat, and the seventeenth-century letter that created the field of probability
Full description- Publisher: BASIC BOOKS
- Published: 05 March 2009
- Format: Hardback 208 pages
- See: Full bibliographic data
- Categories: Probability & Statistics | History Of Mathematics
- ISBN 13: 9780465009107 ISBN 10: 0465009107
- Sales rank: 753,171
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Full description for The Unfinished Game
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.
