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The problem of points, also called the problem of division of the stakes, is a classical problem in probability theory.One of the famous problems that motivated the beginnings of modern probability theory in the 17th century, it led Blaise Pascal to the first explicit reasoning about what today is known as an expected value.
However, Pascal and Fermat, though doing important early work in probability theory, did not develop the field very far. Christiaan Huygens , learning of the subject from the correspondence of Pascal and Fermat, wrote the first book on the subject.
The date which historians cite as the beginning of the development of modern probability theory is 1654, when two of the most well-known mathematicians of the time, Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat, began a correspondence discussing the subject.
The modern mathematical theory of probability has its roots in attempts to analyze games of chance by Gerolamo Cardano in the sixteenth century, and by Pierre de Fermat and Blaise Pascal in the seventeenth century (for example the "problem of points"). [3]
The sustained development of probability began in the year 1654 when Blaise Pascal had some correspondence with his father's friend Pierre de Fermat about two problems concerning games of chance he had heard from the Chevalier de Méré earlier the same year, whom Pascal happened to accompany during a trip.
The Pascal distribution (after Blaise Pascal) and Polya distribution (for George Pólya) are special cases of the negative binomial distribution. A convention among engineers, climatologists, and others is to use "negative binomial" or "Pascal" for the case of an integer-valued stopping-time parameter ( r {\displaystyle r} ) and use "Polya" for ...
1654 – Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat create the mathematical theory of probability, 1657 – Chistiaan Huygens's De ratiociniis in ludo aleae is the first book on mathematical probability, 1662 – John Graunt's Natural and Political Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality makes inferences from statistical data on deaths in London,
In mathematics, Pascal's triangle is an infinite triangular array of the binomial coefficients which play a crucial role in probability theory, combinatorics, and algebra.In much of the Western world, it is named after the French mathematician Blaise Pascal, although other mathematicians studied it centuries before him in Persia, [1] India, [2] China, Germany, and Italy.