MATH 311-01, Probability Theory, Fall 2011

Abstract

As a field of mathematics, probability theory is fairly young. Some historians say that the study of probability began in 1654, when Antoine Gombaud and Chevalier de Mere discovered that their intuition about the results of a certain dice game conflicted with their mathematical analysis. They contacted Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat, who began to exchange letters and who jointly formulated some of the fundamental principles of probability theory.