ABSTRACT
Playing games of chance for money or staking wagers on the outcome of events, human or otherwise, probably dates back to antiquity. Two great minds of the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, inadvertently contributed to our understanding of gambling when they independently formulated a new mathematics of instantaneous motion. We think of time as a natural element in the description of nature. This was not always the case: prior to the theories of Newton and Leibniz, the flux of time, or what Newton called fluxions, was not a component of human thought on nature. After, the laws of nature became more properly understood as laws of motion and nature itself became not a series of static frames but an ever-moving process.
