This is a rush transcript created by a contractor for KPBS to improve accessibility for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. Please refer to the media file as the formal record of this interview. Opinions ...

b y Keith Devlin Basic Books, 208 pp., $24.95 When Keith Devlin, a mathematician and skilled popularizer, was invited to write about a world-changing mathematical document, he chose a letter from ...

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 ...

THIS volume contains Huygens's celebrated essay, “De ratiociniis in ludo aleæ,” and various minor mathematical papers of his earlier years. The theory of probability was founded in 1654, when a ...

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 ...