ABSTRACT
Gambling, the drawing of lots, and other activities that today we associate with chance go back to antiquity. Whether the ancients had a concept of chance that was very close to what is generally meant by chance today is questionable. The use of chance devices for purposes of divination suggests that users, at least sometimes, believed the outcomes to be revealing of otherwise hidden truths: Was the accused party guilty or not? Would the king’s army prevail in battle?…
As a mathematical discipline, probability theory is a relative late-comer; historians of mathematics usually mark its beginning in the middle of the 17th century, with the work of Blaise Pascal, Pierre de Fremat, and some of their contemporaries. It was axiomatized only early in the 20th century as a consequence of the work, primarily, of Andrei Kolmogorov. Today well-formed probability problems generally can be solved straightforwardly with the application of the probability calculus, as laid out, for example, by William Feller (1957, 1966). The usefulness of probability theory has been established beyond doubt in numerous contexts and its impact on the sciences, especially during the 20th century, has been profound.
