Historical background Theory of Probability
(Monday, May 3, 2010)
Galileo (1564-1642), an Italian Mathematician was the first man to attempt at a quantitative measure of probability while dealing with some problems related to the theory of dice in gambling, drawing a card from a deck of cards, tossing of a coin, and so on. But the first foundation of the mathematical theory of probability was laid in the mid-seventeenth
century by 2 French Mathematicians, B Pascal (1623-1662) and P Fermat (1601-1665), while solving a number of problems posed by French gambler and noble man Chevalier-de-Mere to Pacal. The famous ‘problem of points’ posed by de-Mere to Pascal is “Two persons play a game of chance. The person who first gains a certain number of points wins the stake.
They stop playing before the game is completed. How is the stake to be divided on the basis of the number of points each has won? The two Mathematicians after a lengthy correspondence laid the first foundation of the science of probability. In fact, the unquenchable thirst of man for gambling led to the early development of probability theory.
To increase the chances of winning, gamblers called upon Mathematicians to provide optimum strategies for various games of chances.
Other stalwarts in this field are Jacob Bernouli (1654-1705), Abraham de Moivre (1667-1754), Thomas Bayes (1702-1761) and Joseph Lagrange (1736-1813) were among the pioneers who developed probability techniques.
The outstanding contributions by Levy, Mises, Ronald A Fisher, C R Rao are of great importance in the development of modern theory of probability. The Russian mathematicians via., Chebychev (1821-1894), A Markoff (1856-1922) Liapounoff Central limit theorem), A Khinchtine (Law of large numbers), A Kolmogorov (Axioms of probability), also have made a very valuable contributions to the modern theory of probability.
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