When Keith Devlin, a mathematician and skilled popularizer, was invited to write about a world-changing mathematical document, he chose a letter from Blaise Pascal to Pierre de Fermat. Written in 1654 ...

EVEN scholars once thought that fortune alone controlled the future. Forecasting it, unless they were at a casino, was deemed impossible. But Pascal and Fermat, in a series of dashed-off letters in ...

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Talk of meltdowns and bailouts and bouncing stock market numbers are making mathematicians of us all. Not necessarily good mathematicians, but numbers in the news have a way of resonating with even ...

Prior to the development of statistics in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, even rationalists were convinced that no human could speculate on the future. Devlin, NPR's ""Math Guy"" and ...