The difficult birth of stochastics: Jacob Bernoulli's Ars Conjectandi (1713)

摘要

Jacob Bernoulli (1654-1705) did most of his research on the mathematics of uncertainty - or stochastics, as he came to call it - between 1684 and 1690. However, the Ars Conjectandi, in which he presented his insights (including the fundamental "Law of Large Numbers"), was printed only in 1713, eight years after his death. The paper studies the sources and the development of Bernoulli's ideas on probability, the reasons behind the delay in publishing and the circumstances under which his masterpiece eventually reached the public.