• Poetry & Literature

    Keith Devlin - The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeenth-Century Letter that Made the World Modern

    Keith Devlin - The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeenth-Century Letter that Made the World Modern

    Kepler's Bookstore

    October 21, 2008

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    Before the mid-seventeenth century, scholars generally agreed that it was impossible to predict something by calculating mathematical outcomes. One simply could not put a numerical value on the likelihood that a particular event would occur. Even the outcome of something as simple as a dice roll or the likelihood of showers instead of sunshine was thought to lie in the realm of pure, unknowable chance.

    The issue remained intractable until Blaise Pascal wrote to Pierre de Fermat in 1654, outlining a solution to the “unfinished game” problem: how do you divide the pot when players are forced to end a game of dice before someone has won? The idea turned out to be far more seminal than Pascal realized. From it, the two men developed the method known today as probability theory.

    In The Unfinished Game, Keith Devlin tells the story of this correspondence and its remarkable impact on the modern world: from insurance rates, to housing and job markets, to the safety of cars and planes. Calculating probabilities allowed people, for the first time, to think rationally about how future events might unfold.

    Keith Devlin is a senior researcher at Stanford University’s Center for the Study of Language and Information and its executive director, a consulting professor in the Department of Mathematics, and a co-founder of the Stanford Media X research network and of the university’s H-STAR institute. He has written twenty-five books and over seventy-five published research articles. He is the “Math Guy” on National Public Radio. He lives in Palo Alto.

    • Ticket Info

      Tickets: Free

      Info Phone: 650-324-4321

    • Dates & Times

      Dates:
      October 21, 2008

      Times:
      7:30pm

    • Venue Info

      Kepler's Books

      1010 El Camino Real Menlo Park, CA 94025

      Full map and directions

    • Parking Info

      Free underground and nearby street parking.

    • Accessibility Info
      • Wheelchair Access

    • NOTE: We do our best to ensure all information is accurate, however it's a good idea to visit the website or call the venue to verify the information.

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