In 1760, while holding a professorship at the University of Basel in Switzerland, Bernoulli produced a paper on smallpox, exploring the costs versus the benefits of universal immunization against that disease. His career was long and eclectic, encompassing mathematical work on a wide range of topics in physics, astronomy, and political economy, from the movement of fluids and the oscillation of strings to the measurement of risk and ideas about insurance. The smallpox study seems almost anomalous amid Bernoulli’s other interests, except that it also entailed the notion of calculating risk.
