Considerations on probability: from games of chance to modern science

Abstract

The article sets out a number of considerations on the distinction between variability and uncertainty over the centuries. Games of chance have always been useful random experiments which through combinatorial calculation have opened the way to probability theory and to the interpretation of modern science through statistical laws. The article also looks briefly at the stormy nineteenth-century debate concerning the definitions of probability which went over the same grounds – sometimes without any historical awareness – as the debate which arose at the very beginnings of probability theory, when the great probability theorists were open to every possible meaning of the term.

Keywords

• History of probability
• Definitions of Probability
• P. S. Laplace
• B. De Finetti