ABSTRACT
2.1 Probability
Many statements made in everyday conversation contain descriptions of uncertainty: ‘It may rain tomorrow’; ‘That embankment should be high enough to hold against this year's storms’; ‘I wouldn't do that if I were you’. The theory of probability provides a basis for constructing exact measures of uncertainty. The theory of probability is often considered to have begun in the mid-sixteenth century, when the Italian mathematician and gambler Girolamo Cardano wrote his ‘book on games of chance’. Many of the ideas of probability theory can be illustrated through examples relating to dice and cards, and some such examples are used in what follows. In this chapter, a brief introduction is given to some of the concepts underlying reliability theory. The treatment is not intended to be exhaustive, and readers seeking further detail are referred to the list of further reading at the end of the chapter.
