相关论文: Isaac Newton as a Probabilist

In 1919 A. Einstein suspected first that gravitational fields could play an essential role in the structure of elementary particles. In 1937, P.A.M. Dirac found a miraculous link between the properties of the visible Universe and elementary…

We consider a simple dice game, which leads to an intriguing study of multinomial walks, with surprising and seemingly paradoxical properties. The winning and losing probabilities of a general version of the game are investigated via…

Modern statistical software and machine learning libraries are enabling semi-automated statistical inference. Within this context, it appears easier and easier to try and fit many models to the data at hand, reversing thereby the Fisherian…

To an adult, it's obvious that the day of someone's death is not precisely determined by the day of birth, but it's a very different story for a child. When the third named author was four years old he asked his father, the fifth named…

The mathematics of classical probability theory was subsumed into classical measure theory by Kolmogorov in 1933. Quantum theory as nonclassical probability theory was incorporated into the beginnings of noncommutative measure theory by von…

Are symmetries discovered or rather invented by humans ? The stand you may take firmly here reveals a lot of your epistemological position. Conversely, the arguments you may forge for answering to this question, or to one of its numerous…

Classical statistics and Bayesian statistics refer to the frequentist and subjective theories of probability respectively. Von Mises and De Finetti, who authored those conceptualizations, provide interpretations of the probability that…

The myth that the expansion of the Universe was discovered by Hubble was first propagated by Humason (1931). The true nature of this discovery turns out to have been both more complex and more interesting.

The Fibonacci numbers are familiar to all of us. They appear unexpectedly often in mathematics, so much there is an entire journal and a sequence of conferences dedicated to their study. However, there is also another sequence of numbers…

As shown by Pitowsky, the Bell inequalities are related to certain classes of probabilistic inequalities dealt with by George Boole, back in the 1850s. Here a short presentation of this relationship is given. Consequently, the Bell…

This paper is devoted to Poincar\'e's work in probability. Though the subject does not represent a large part of the mathematician's achievements, it provides significant insight into the evolution of Poincar\'e's thought on several…

Given two non-zero integers $a$ and $b$ there exist integers $m$ and $n$ for which $am-bn =(a,b)$. An increasing number of mathematicians have been calling this `B\'ezout's identity', some encouraged by finding "identit\'e de B\'ezout" in…

Physicists have, hitherto, mostly adopted a frequentist conception of probability, according to which probability statements apply only to ensembles. It is argued that we should, instead, adopt an epistemic, or Bayesian conception, in which…

Incomputability as a mathematical notion arose from work of Alan Turing and Alonzo Church in the 1930s. Like Turing himself, it attracted less attention than it deserved beyond the confines of mathematics. Today our experiences in computer…

This dialogue explores the possibility of updating a probability as a consequence of unlearning, reversing the role of prior and posterior probabilities.

Random sampling in high dimensions has successfully been applied to phenomena as diverse as nuclear resonances, neural networks and black hole evaporation. Here we revisit an elegant argument by the British physicist Dennis Sciama, which…

This is a short historical note concerning the evolution of Wetzel's problem and Erdos' solution.

The problem of assigning probabilities when little is known is analized in the case where the quanities of interest are physical observables, i.e. can be measured and their values expressed by numbers. It is pointed out that the assignment…

Ce m\'emoire r\'ealis\'e \`a l'IUFM de Cr\'eteil en 1998 sous la direction d'Evelyne Barbin \'etudie l'histoire du d\'ebut du calcul des probabilit\'es. Sources: correspondance entre Pascal et Fermat, et Trait\'e du triangle arithm\'etique…

This book covers the history of probability up to Kolmogorov with essential additional coverage of statistics up to Fisher. Based on my work of ca. 50 years, it is the only suchlike book. Gorrochurn (2016) is similar but his study of events…