CHAPTER ONE - KUBEIAGENESIS

Abstract

This chapter presents an overview of the history of gambling and the development of probability theory. In the 16th century came the first reasoned considerations relating games of chance to a rudimentary theory of probability by the efforts of one Gerolamo Cardano, who in his Liber de Ludo Aleae, the Book on Games of Chance (published posthumously in 1663) expressed a rough concept of mathematical expectation, derived power laws for the repetition of events, and conceived the definition of probability as a frequency ratio. Then, in 1654, Fermât and Pascal, based on considerations of games of chance, placed the theory of probability in a mathematical framework. During the latter half of the 19th century, advances in probability theory were associated in great measure with Russian mathematicians. Probability theory was carried into the 20th century by two philosophers—Lord Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes. Recent contributions to probability theory have become highly complex. The frontiers of the subject have advanced well beyond the earlier intimacy with games of chance.