IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/istatr/v82y2014i1p1-16.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Soft Questions, Hard Answers: Jacob Bernoulli's Probability in Historical Context

Author

Listed:
  • Stephen Stigler

Abstract

type="main" xml:id="insr12049-abs-0001"> On the 300th anniversary of the publication of Jacob Bernoulli's Ars Conjectandi, the book is revisited in historical context and seen in a new light. Bernoulli's announced goal of extending the application of probability from games to civil life was frustrated by the a priori difficulty of specifying equally likely cases. The great approximation theorem Bernoulli proved and suggested could lead to empirical applications was impractical for all but unrealistically large sample sizes, but it was immensely influential in the development of the mathematics of probability.

Suggested Citation

  • Stephen Stigler, 2014. "Soft Questions, Hard Answers: Jacob Bernoulli's Probability in Historical Context," International Statistical Review, International Statistical Institute, vol. 82(1), pages 1-16, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:istatr:v:82:y:2014:i:1:p:1-16
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/insr.12049
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hansen, Lars Peter, 2013. "Uncertainty Outside and Inside Economic Models," Nobel Prize in Economics documents 2013-7, Nobel Prize Committee.
    2. Lars Peter Hansen, 2014. "Nobel Lecture: Uncertainty Outside and Inside Economic Models," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 122(5), pages 945-987.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:istatr:v:82:y:2014:i:1:p:1-16. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/isiiinl.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.