2025/09/30 by Stephen M. Stigler · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Mathematics · #Economic Theory and Institutions #Philosophy and History of Science #Probability and Statistical Research
paper · pdf · doi:10.1215/00182702-12213473
openalex publication_date 2025/09/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/03/07
The history of probability is itself stochastic: It does not change at random, but it does vary over time in response to the questions asked, and it is susceptible to occasional discoveries of new information.Once a story has been widely accepted it becomes a part of "history."For example, "everybody knows" that modern probability began in 1654 when the Chevalier de Mr asked Blaise Pascal about a problem in dice, inspiring correspondence with Pierre Fermat on (among other things) the chances of winning an interrupted game.Of course, that story is more complicated: There were many earlier examples with less complete stories, and the Fermat-Pascal correspondence was not published until 1678, twenty-one years after Christian Huygens published a small tract on the subject, knowing about the Fermat-Pascal correspondence but apparently ignorant of much of its content.The Huygens tract was treated dismissively as elementary until people started to ask different questions and discovered that his supposedly simple first three propositions elegantly dissected simple gambles in a way foreshadowing modern derivative contracts.Lorraine Daston tells the story of Huygens in her reissued 1988 masterpiece, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment.It is described as a "new edition," but it is an exact clone of the original (including old typos and a now out-of-date bibliography), with the addition of only a new seven-page preface (with one new typo).But even this classic shows its age at a mere thirty-five years.Some signs are minor: A recent discovery of an offprint of the original Bayes-Price publication of Bayes' Theorem suggests Price's direct motive for that work was Hume's essay on miracles, and we might now assign a greater role to Price in creating the work than in most accounts, including Price's direct contact with Hume (Stigler 2025).