Researched
Probability Theory
Pascal and Fermat found the mathematics of chance in a correspondence about a dice game, the basis of statistics, insurance and AI.
Open in the interactive tree →In 1654 the gambler de Méré posed Pascal a question about an interrupted game; Pascal and Fermat solved it and laid the foundation. Bernoulli (1713), Bayes (1763) and Laplace turned it into a theory, and Gauss (1809) and later Fisher (1920s) built modern statistics. Without it there would be no insurance, no clinical trials and no machine learning.
Prerequisites
Unlocks
- Insurance & Risk Pooling~1690
- Smallpox inoculation1721
- Bayesian Inference1763
- Statistics & Least Squares1809
- Epidemiology1854
- Mendel's laws of heredity1866
- Statistical Mechanics1877
- Social Insurance1883Actuarial risk tables for sickness, accident and pension insurance rest on probability
- Measure-Theoretic Probability1902-1933
- Markov Chains1906
- Field trials and randomization1925
- Game Theory1944
- Information Theory1948
- Web search and PageRank1998