Mathematics Info

Probability History

         









 (a) Blaise Pascal        
                  
     


(b) Pierre de Fermat

In 1654, a French aristocrat gambler named Chevalier de Mere gave Blaise Pascal the following problem. 

"in eight probability of throwing a dice, a certain gambler who bets on a certain amount of money has to come up with a score of 1 to win the bet. But after three throws, which all of them failed, the game was halted for a reason. The dealer, who obviously hates losing, insists on retaining some of the gambler's bet money as a collateral. The question is, how much of the money must be retained ?"

In the beginning Pascal considered this as an easy problem which can be solved with common logics and algebra. But after spending days trying to find the solution he started to consider it as a difficult problem and realized that there was no branch of mathematics that could be used to solve it. He then communicated the problem to his fellow mathematician named Pierre de Fermat. After going through exhausting communications, they finally suceeded in finding the solution. Their attempt became the beginning of the development of modern probability theories.