Mathematical Probabilities in Games of Chance The Game of Sevens

Abstract

In a letter to Pascal from a courtier, friend of Mme. de Maintenon and gambler, we read the following: “Remember that I am discovering things which you would have never seen for yourself, things so rare that the wisest ancients completely ignored them and at which the greatest modern mathematicians have been surprised.” The writer was Antoine Gombault, Chevalier de Méré (1610-1684). The “things so rare” were the gambling chances in a dice game. The things the wisest ancients completely ignored were the problems presented by random events, and the things at which the greatest modern mathematicians have been surprised were the heretofore unexplored realms of chance, of mathematical probabilities, which the keen intellects of Pascal, Fermat, De Moivre, Bernoulli, Lagrange and Laplace organized into an important science, the science of Modern Statistics.