Ian Pitchford

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Before taking his life, he wrote what many regard as the first book that made inroads into predicting the behaviour of the dice as it rolls across the table. Although written around 1564, Liber de Ludo Aleae didn’t see the light of day until it was eventually published in 1663. It was in fact the great Italian physicist Galileo Galilei who applied the same analysis that Cardano had described to decide whether to bet on a score of 9 or 10 when three dice are thrown. He reasoned that there are 6 × 6 × 6 = 216 different futures the dice could take. Of these, 25 gave you a 9 while 27 gave you a ...more
What We Cannot Know: Explorations at the Edge of Knowledge
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