Who is the inventor of probability

In October Pascal wrote New Experiments Concerning Vacuums which led to disputes with a number of scientists who, like Descartes , did not believe in a vacuum. From May Pascal worked on mathematics and physics writing Treatise on the Equilibrium of Liquids in which he explains Pascal's law of pressure. Adamson writes in [ 3 ] :- This treatise is a complete outline of a system of hydrostatics, the first in the history of science, it embodies his most distinctive and important contribution to physical theory.

He worked on conic sections and produced important theorems in projective geometry. In The Generation of Conic Sections mostly completed by March but worked on again in and Pascal considered conics generated by central projection of a circle.

This was meant to be the first part of a treatise on conics which Pascal never completed. The work is now lost but Leibniz and Tschirnhaus made notes from it and it is through these notes that a fairly complete picture of the work is now possible.

Although Pascal was not the first to study the Pascal triangle , his work on the topic in Treatise on the Arithmetical Triangle was the most important on this topic and, through the work of Wallis , Pascal's work on the binomial coefficients was to lead Newton to his discovery of the general binomial theorem for fractional and negative powers.

In correspondence with Fermat he laid the foundation for the theory of probability. This correspondence consisted of five letters and occurred in the summer of They considered the dice problem, already studied by Cardan , and the problem of points also considered by Cardan and, around the same time, Pacioli and Tartaglia.

The dice problem asks how many times one must throw a pair of dice before one expects a double six while the problem of points asks how to divide the stakes if a game of dice is incomplete. They solved the problem of points for a two player game but did not develop powerful enough mathematical methods to solve it for three or more players. Through the period of this correspondence Pascal was unwell. In one of the letters to Fermat written in July he writes However, despite his health problems, he worked intensely on scientific and mathematical questions until October Sometime around then he nearly lost his life in an accident.

The horses pulling his carriage bolted and the carriage was left hanging over a bridge above the river Seine. Although he was rescued without any physical injury, it does appear that he was much affected psychologically. Not long after he underwent another religious experience, on 23 November , and he pledged his life to Christianity.

He began to publish anonymous works on religious topics, eighteen Provincial Letters being published during and early These were written in defence of his friend Antoine Arnauld , an opponent of the Jesuits and a defender of Jansenism, who was on trial before the faculty of theology in Paris for his controversial religious works.

This work contains 'Pascal's wager' which claims to prove that belief in God is rational with the following argument. If God does not exist, one will lose nothing by believing in him, while if he does exist, one will lose everything by not believing.

Had this manuscript not been lost, Cardan would have certainly been accredited with the onset of probability theory.

However, the manuscript was not discovered until and printed in , leaving the door open for independent discovery. The onset of probability as a useful science is primarily attributed to Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat While contemplating a gambling problem posed by Chevalier de Mere in , Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat laid the fundamental groundwork of probability theory, and are thereby accredited the fathers of probability.

The question posed was pertaining to the number of turns required to ensure obtaining a six in the roll of two dice. In and , the government awarded Kolmogorov two Orders of Lenin for his wartime contributions, and after the war, he served as a mathematics consultant for the thermonuclear weapons program.

Mathematics had led him to believe that the world was both driven by chance and fundamentally ordered according to the laws of probability. He often reflected on the role of the unlikely in human affairs. Kolmogorov objected, taking a radical probabilistic view of social interactions in which people acted as statistical samples of larger groups.

Music and literature were deeply important to Kolmogorov, who believed he could analyze them probabilistically to gain insight into the inner workings of the human mind. He was a cultural elitist who believed in a hierarchy of artistic values.

At the pinnacle were the writings of Goethe, Pushkin, and Thomas Mann, alongside the compositions of Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart, and Beethoven—works whose enduring value resembled eternal mathematical truths. Kolmogorov stressed that every true work of art was a unique creation, something unlikely by definition, something outside the realm of simple statistical regularity. Yet he longed to find the key to understanding the nature of artistic creativity.

In Kolmogorov armed a group of researchers with electromechanical calculators and charged them with the task of calculating the rhythmical structures of Russian poetry. Kolmogorov was particularly interested in the deviation of actual rhythms from classical meters.

In traditional poetics, the iambic meter is a rhythm consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. But in practice, this rule is rarely obeyed. An unlikely pattern of stresses, he thought, indicated artistic inventiveness and expression. To measure the artistic merit of texts, Kolmogorov also employed a letter-guessing method to evaluate the entropy of natural language. In information theory, entropy is a measure of uncertainty or unpredictability, corresponding to the information content of a message: the more unpredictable the message, the more information it carries.

Kolmogorov turned entropy into a measure of artistic originality. His group conducted a series of experiments, showing volunteers a fragment of Russian prose or poetry and asking them to guess the next letter, then the next, and so on. Kolmogorov privately remarked that, from the viewpoint of information theory, Soviet newspapers were less informative than poetry, since political discourse employed a large number of stock phrases and was highly predictable in its content.

The verses of great poets, on the other hand, were much more difficult to predict, despite the strict limitations imposed on them by the poetic form.

The accident created a shift in the family's religious beliefs, as the Pascals had never fully embraced local Jesuit ideas. After Etienne's accident, he received medical visits from two brothers who were also followers of Jansenism, a particular denomination within the Catholic Church. Their influence, presumably coupled with trauma over Etienne's health, led the family to convert.

Pascal became devoutly religious and sister Jacqueline eventually becoming a Jansenist nun. In , inspired by the idea of making his father's job of calculating taxes easier, Pascal Pascal started work on a calculator dubbed the Pascaline.

German polymath William Schickard had developed and manufactured an earlier version of the calculator in The Pascaline was a numerical wheel calculator with movable dials, each representing a numerical digit. The invention, however, was not without its glitches: There was a discrepancy between the calculator's design and the structure of French currency at the time.

Pascal continued to work on improving the device, with 50 prototypes produced by , but the Pascaline was never a big seller. In , Pascal starting writing more of his theorems in The Generation of Conic Sections , but he pushed the work aside until the following decade.

At the end of the s, Pascal temporarily focused his experiments on the physical sciences. In , by having his brother-in-law take readings of the barometric pressure at various altitudes on a mountain Pascal was too poor of health to make the trek himself , he validated Torricelli's theory concerning the cause of barometrical variations.

In the s, Pascal set about trying to create a perpetual motion machine, the purpose of which was to produce more energy than it used. In the process, he stumbled upon an accidental invention and in Pascal's roulette machine was born. Aptly, he derived its name from the French word for "little wheel. Overlapping his work on the roulette machine was Pascal's correspondence with mathematical theorist Pierre de Fermat, which began in Through their letters discussing gambling and Pascal's own experiments, he found that there is a fixed likelihood of a particular outcome when it comes to the roll of the dice.