The Book on Games of Chance: The 16th Century Treatise on Probability

(Paperback)

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Gambling led Cardano to the study of probability, and he formulated of some of the field's basic ideas more than a century before the better-known correspondence of Pascal and Fermat. Published posthumously in 1663, this volume had no direct influence on other early thinkers about probability but remains an important antecedent to later expressions of the science's tenets.

Author Bio

Mathematics was only one area of interest for Gerolamo Cardano (1521-76). The Italian astrologer, philosopher, physician, and scholar was also a prolific author and inveterate gambler. Dover also publishes Cardano's The Rules of Algebra. Sydney Henry Gould is a mathematician and author of Russian for the Mathematician. Samuel S. Wilks (1906-64) was a mathematician who taught at Princeton and made significant contributions to the field of mathematical statistics.