alt.hn

4/21/2026 at 12:59:59 PM

A Renaissance gambling dispute spawned probability theory

 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-a-renaissance-gambling-dispute-spawned-probability-theory/

by sohkamyung

4/23/2026 at 4:00:50 PM

The article links to a series of letters between Fermat, Pascal, and Carcavi which are wonderfully intelligent and readable, while also deeply kind and personal.

> 1. I have been delighted to have had the thoughts conformed to those of M. Pascal, for I admire infinitely his genius and I believe him very capable of coming to the end of all that which he will undertake. The friendship that he offers me is so dear to me and so considerable that I must have no difficulty in making some use of it in the publishing of my Treatises.

> Our blows always continue and I am as glad as you in the admiration that our thoughts are arranged so exactly that it seems that they have taken one same route and make one same path

It makes me wonder if future generations will look back on correspondences between guys like Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.

https://probabilityandfinance.com/pulskamp/Pascal/Sources/pa...

by joenot443

4/23/2026 at 9:06:54 PM

Perhaps future generations will reference certain threads here on HN.

by divbzero

4/23/2026 at 11:31:46 PM

This does happen some on other websites. I've often seen people in math discuss things that Bill Thurston (a fields medalist) has posted on mathoverflow

https://mathoverflow.net/users/9062/bill-thurston

note that he has been deceased for nearly 15 years now.

by mswphd

4/23/2026 at 11:30:29 PM

In math, Grothendieck's correspondences are quite famous. Here's a book that is entirely 300 pages of letters between him and J.P. Serre

https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~leila.schneps/grothendieckcircl...

There are many others for Grothendieck though.

Another example is how Godel wrote a letter to Von Neumann towards the end of his life. This letter contained, among other things, the (now very funny) question of whether a certain NP complete problem may be solvable in quadratic time.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~odonnell/15455-s17/hartmanis-on-gode...

Practically though, modern correspondence is often through a disjoint set of technologies, that (importantly) someone cleaning up the estate of a deceased person does not necessarily have access to. So it seems unlikely we'll get this kind of insight going forward (with notable exceptions, for example the Epstein emails).

by mswphd

4/24/2026 at 6:02:24 AM

> It makes me wonder if future generations will look back on correspondences between guys like Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.

We kinda had that, on Usenet, before spammers flooded it to death.

by Natsu

4/23/2026 at 6:17:42 PM

[dead]

by decremental

4/23/2026 at 1:36:09 PM

> a French gambler and intellectual socialite enlisted the help

Imagine Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat teaming together to solve your problem.

by skywal_l

4/23/2026 at 3:45:34 PM

Just wanted to flag that the works of Ian Hacking, especially The Emergence of Probability (1975) and The Taming of Chance (1990) are excellent on this. Dense and challenging at times but also well written and the product of a very original mind.

The latter book has a Wikipedia page with some more info - was surprised to see Hacking not mentioned here since the featured article is partly based on his work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Taming_of_Chance

by benbreen

4/24/2026 at 4:34:07 AM

I'm busy reading a book [0] by Keith Devlin about the correspondence between Pascal and Fermat. It's called the unfinished game and has been really good so far. It goes through the letters and provides some context around them. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/4443547-the-unfinishe...

by pjacotg

4/23/2026 at 3:09:59 PM

Luca Pacioli invented (or really, put down on paper) double-entry accounting

it is funny how probability has always been way behind other maths. i got to use the Birthday problem at work, once, which made the math undergrad totally worth it

fortunately my Polymarket and Kalshi wagers are protected by AES et al

by The_Blade

4/23/2026 at 4:20:04 PM

In what way was it always behind? This work of Fermat and Pascal is ballpark contemporary to the development of calculus.

by sorokod

4/23/2026 at 4:39:57 PM

Right, and Cauchy is the person we have to thank for Bayes’ Theorem, and of course Euler, De Moivre, Poisson and Gauss for the Gaussian integral[1]. You can’t really get figures more central to mathematics than that.

[1] Athough Gauss apparently credited it to Laplace.

by seanhunter

4/23/2026 at 6:19:18 PM

Most of the names you mention belong to the next (18th) century.

Gauss worked out some sort of probability distribution too.

by sorokod

4/23/2026 at 4:04:59 PM

As one lecturer put it: modern probability theory derived from two foundations - measure theory and gambling. The latter explains why it has long lacked mainstream mathematical recognition :)

But that's all in the past. Probability is absolutely established in math academia today, Fields medals and all. And despite its applied nature it's pervasive even in pure math.

by c7b

4/23/2026 at 5:25:20 PM

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Bernstein is an enjoyable read on this.

by quercusa