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| Suzanne Miller Instructor Math 124 | Online Probability: A Brief History | |
| 1662: Ties to Gambling |
Probability, the calculation of the likelihood of an event, is a recent development in Mathematics. It's generally considered to have been developed 350 years ago in France. A French nobleman, the Chevalier de Mere, was a gambler who asked his friend, the mathematican Pascal, to explain why some gambling bets made money over time but others consistently lost over time. Pascal wrote to his colleague Fermet and the ensuing correspondence the foundation of probability was laid. Probabilty initially wasn't considered a serious branch of mathematics because of it's involvement in gambling. |
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| The Greeks | The Greek mathematicians had the mathematical techniques to support calculating probability, but not the culture. In Greek culture the gods, fate, completely determine the events in life, man had no influence and so they had no notion of risk. |
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| 1545: Earliest Ideas |
An Italian physician, mathematician and gambler, Cardano, wrote the first theoretical study of probabilities and gambling 100 years earlier in 1545 but his work wasn't recognized until after Pascal and Fermet aroused interest in probabilities. |
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| 1662 Life Insurance |
John Graunt first used probability for a purpose other than gambling. He analyzed death records to assess mortality risk and set appropriate fees for the first English life insurance policies. |
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| 1713 More Uses |
Probability was shown to be a serious area of interest when Jacob Bernoulli published The Art of Guessing suggesting uses in governemtn, economics, law and genetics. |
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| 1812 Data Analysis |
Probability became a respectible and serious field when Laplace, a Frenchman, published a work written in conjunction with his astronomical studies and showed probability as an aid to scientific data analysis.
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| 1865 Genetics |
Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, was the first to apply probability techniques to genetics. He experimented with genetic inheritence using pea pods in the abbey garden and used progbability to explain the randomness of genetics.
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| Today | Probabilty is widely used to assess risk and aid decisions in many fields. In medicine, the risk of different treatments is compared, car insurance rates are based on the chance of a claim and product quality is assessed based on the probable defects of components. One event the use of probability might have averted was the explosion of the Challenger Space shuttle.
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| Probability Questions /Probability Vocabulary /Probability Formulas Probability Websites /Probability Projects /Probability Index Math 124 Overview / Index/Module Topics/ Math 124 by Week Diablo Valley College, Pleasant Hill, California 94523 Phone(510) 685-1230 latest update 1.7.98 | ||