The Unfinished Game

The Unfinished Game



Basic Books, || ISBN 978-0-465-00910-7 || Author: KEITH DEVLIN || English || PDF || 202 Pages || 1.45 MB

Preface
When Basic Books editor Bill Frucht approached me with the idea of a book about a single mathematics document that changed the course of history, my first thought was the letter Pascal wrote to Fermat in the seventeenth century that established modern probability theory. Everyone who has taken a course in probability theory will have heard the story of this letter. But few people, myself included, have ever read the original or looked into the story that surrounds it. Eager to work with Bill once again (he edited my earlier books The Math Gene and The Millennium Problems), I was moved to look more closely at the famous correspondence. What I discovered astonished me. The story is far more fascinating than I knew, and the letter itself provides a revealing insight into how two of the world’s greatest mathematical minds grappled with a problem, stumbling, making “elementary” errors, eventually being rewarded with flashes of brilliance. What also became clear from reading what the experts wrote before and after this letter was just how great was the revolution it brought about in the way humans think about the future. Much of the way we live our lives today was made possible by the mathematical ideas expressed in those few pages. In addition to Bill, who has once again been a delight to work with, this project benefited from the editorial hand of Basic’s Courtney Miller and from the advice and guidance of my agent, Ted Weinstein. Professor John Stillwell, who read the first draft of the manuscript, put my mind at rest that—as a mathematician, not a historian of mathematics—I had not made any serious gaffes in reporting the historical development.

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